African American History (Magill's Choice) 3 Vol. set

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African American History

MAGILL’S C H O I C E

African American History Volume 1 Abolition — Fugitive Slave Law of 1793

Edited by

Carl L. Bankston III Tulane University

Salem Press Inc. Pasadena, California

Hackensack, New Jersey

Frontispiece: Picketer protesting discriminatory hiring practices in Chicago in 1941. (Library of Congress)

Copyright © 2006, by Salem Press, Inc. All rights in this book are reserved. No part of this work may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, without written permission from the copyright owner except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews. For information address the publisher, Salem Press, Inc., P.O. Box 50062, Pasadena, California 91115. ∞ The paper used in these volumes conforms to the American National Standard for Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, Z39.48-1992 (R1997) Some essays originally appeared in American Justice (1996), Encyclopedia of the U.S. Supreme Court (2000), Great Events from History II: Arts and Culture (1993), Great Events from History II: Human Rights (1992), Great Events from History: North American Series, Revised Edition (1997), Great Events of the 20th Century (2002), Racial and Ethnic Relations in America (2000), The Fifties in America (2005), The Sixties in America (1999), and Women's Issues (1997). New material has been added. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data African American history / edited by Carl L. Bankston, III. p. cm. -- (Magill's choice) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN-13: 978-1-58765-239-4 (set : alk. paper) ISBN-10: 1-58765-239-0 (set : alk. paper) ISBN-13: 978-1-58765-240-0 (v. 1 : alk. paper) ISBN-10: 1-58765-240-4 (v. 1 : alk. paper) [etc.] 1. African Americans--History. I. Bankston, Carl L. (Carl Leon), 1952II. Series. E185.A25355 2005 973'.0496073--dc22 2005015348 First Printing

printed in the united states of america

Contents Complete List of Contents. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ix Publisher’s Note . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . xv Introduction to African American History . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . xix Contributors. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . xxvii Abolition . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1 Abolitionist movement and women . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5 Adarand Constructors v. Peña . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 13 Affirmative action . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 15 African Liberation Day . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 25 African Methodist Episcopal Church . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 26 African Methodist Episcopal Zion Churches . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 30 Afrocentrism . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 31 Agriculture . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 32 Albemarle Paper Company v. Moody . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 39 Alexander v. Holmes County Board of Education . . . . . . . . . . . . . 40 American Anti-Slavery Society. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 42 American Colonization Society . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 46 Amistad slave revolt . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 47 Anderson’s Lincoln Memorial concert . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 51 Antislavery laws of 1777 and 1807 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 58 Ashmun Institute . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 62 Atlanta Compromise . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 67 Bakke case . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 71 Baptist Church . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 78 Baseball’s racial integration. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 82 Batson v. Kentucky . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 90 Birmingham March . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 91 Black cabinet . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 94 Black Christian Nationalist Movement . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 95 Black church . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 97 Black codes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 103 Black colleges and universities . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 107 Black flight . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 112 Black Is Beautiful movement . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 114 Black Jews . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 115 “Black Manifesto” . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 117 Black nationalism . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 118 Black Panther Party . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 123 v

African American History Black Power movement . . . . . . . . . Black United Students . . . . . . . . . . Bleeding Kansas . . . . . . . . . . . . . Bolling v. Sharpe . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters . . Brown v. Board of Education. . . . . . . . Brown v. Mississippi . . . . . . . . . . . . Brownsville incident . . . . . . . . . . . Buchanan v. Warley . . . . . . . . . . . . Buffalo soldiers . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Burton v. Wilmington Parking Authority .

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129 132 134 137 138 140 144 145 147 147 150

Charleston race riots . . . . . . . . . . Chicago riots . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Chicago sit-ins . . . . . . . . . . . . . Chisholm’s election to Congress . . . Church bombings. . . . . . . . . . . . Church burnings . . . . . . . . . . . . Civil Rights Act of 1866 . . . . . . . . Civil Rights Act of 1957 . . . . . . . . Civil Rights Act of 1960 . . . . . . . . Civil Rights Act of 1964 . . . . . . . . Civil Rights Act of 1968 . . . . . . . . Civil Rights Act of 1991 . . . . . . . . Civil Rights Acts of 1866-1875. . . . . Civil Rights cases . . . . . . . . . . . . Civil Rights movement . . . . . . . . Civil Rights movement and children . Civil Rights Restoration Act. . . . . . Civil rights worker murders. . . . . . Civil War . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Clinton massacre . . . . . . . . . . . . Clotilde capture . . . . . . . . . . . . . Colfax massacre. . . . . . . . . . . . . Colored Women’s League . . . . . . . Combahee River Collective . . . . . . Compromise of 1850 . . . . . . . . . . Compromise of 1877 . . . . . . . . . . Confiscation Acts of 1861 and 1862. . Congress of Racial Equality . . . . . . Congressional Black Caucus . . . . . Cooper v. Aaron . . . . . . . . . . . . . Council of Federated Organizations . Cowboys. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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Contents Crown Heights conflicts . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 268 Cubans and African Americans. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 270 Cumming v. Richmond County Board of Education . . . . . . . . . . . 276 Defense industry desegregation . . . Demographic trends . . . . . . . . . . Disfranchisement laws in Mississippi Draft riots . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Dyer antilynching bill . . . . . . . . .

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277 283 294 298 302

Economic trends . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Edmonson v. Leesville Concrete Company. . . . . Education . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Edwards v. South Carolina. . . . . . . . . . . . . Emancipation Proclamation . . . . . . . . . . . Employment . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Equal Employment Opportunity Act of 1972 . Equal Employment Opportunity Commission Evans v. Abney . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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304 314 315 322 323 327 331 338 340

Fair Employment Practices Committee Fair Housing Act . . . . . . . . . . . . . Fifteenth Amendment . . . . . . . . . . Film history . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Fourteenth Amendment . . . . . . . . . Free African Society . . . . . . . . . . . Free blacks. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Freedmen’s Bureau . . . . . . . . . . . . Freedom Rides . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Freedom Summer . . . . . . . . . . . . Freemasons in Boston . . . . . . . . . . Fugitive Slave Law of 1793 . . . . . . .

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Complete List of Contents Volume 1 Black flight, 112 Black Is Beautiful movement, 114 Black Jews, 115 “Black Manifesto,” 117 Black nationalism, 118 Black Panther Party, 123 Black Power movement, 129 Black United Students, 132 Bleeding Kansas, 134 Bolling v. Sharpe, 137 Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, 138 Brown v. Board of Education, 140 Brown v. Mississippi, 144 Brownsville incident, 145 Buchanan v. Warley, 147 Buffalo soldiers, 147 Burton v. Wilmington Parking Authority, 150 Charleston race riots, 151 Chicago riots, 152 Chicago sit-ins, 154 Chisholm’s election to Congress, 161 Church bombings, 169 Church burnings, 174 Civil Rights Act of 1866, 177 Civil Rights Act of 1957, 182 Civil Rights Act of 1960, 183 Civil Rights Act of 1964, 188 Civil Rights Act of 1968, 195 Civil Rights Act of 1991, 198 Civil Rights Acts of 1866-1875, 199 Civil Rights cases, 202 Civil Rights movement, 204 Civil Rights movement and children, 214

Abolition , 1 Abolitionist movement and women, 5 Adarand Constructors v. Peña, 13 Affirmative action, 15 African Liberation Day, 25 African Methodist Episcopal Church, 26 African Methodist Episcopal Zion Churches, 30 Afrocentrism, 31 Agriculture, 32 Albemarle Paper Company v. Moody, 39 Alexander v. Holmes County Board of Education, 40 American Anti-Slavery Society, 42 American Colonization Society, 46 Amistad slave revolt, 47 Anderson’s Lincoln Memorial concert, 51 Antislavery laws of 1777 and 1807, 58 Ashmun Institute, 62 Atlanta Compromise, 67 Bakke case, 71 Baptist Church, 78 Baseball’s racial integration, 82 Batson v. Kentucky, 90 Birmingham March, 91 Black cabinet, 94 Black Christian Nationalist Movement, 95 Black church, 97 Black codes, 103 Black colleges and universities, 107 ix

African American History Draft riots, 298 Dyer antilynching bill, 302 Economic trends, 304 Edmonson v. Leesville Concrete Company, 314 Education, 315 Edwards v. South Carolina, 322 Emancipation Proclamation, 323 Employment, 327 Equal Employment Opportunity Act of 1972, 331 Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, 338 Evans v. Abney, 340 Fair Employment Practices Committee, 340 Fair Housing Act, 342 Fifteenth Amendment, 347 Film history, 352 Fourteenth Amendment, 357 Free African Society, 362 Free blacks, 366 Freedmen’s Bureau, 367 Freedom Rides, 372 Freedom Summer, 374 Freemasons in Boston, 377 Fugitive Slave Law of 1793, 382

Civil Rights Restoration Act, 215 Civil rights worker murders, 219 Civil War, 226 Clinton massacre, 233 Clotilde capture, 234 Colfax massacre, 239 Colored Women’s League, 240 Combahee River Collective, 241 Compromise of 1850, 243 Compromise of 1877, 248 Confiscation Acts of 1861 and 1862, 249 Congress of Racial Equality, 250 Congressional Black Caucus, 256 Cooper v. Aaron, 258 Council of Federated Organizations, 260 Cowboys, 267 Crown Heights conflicts, 268 Cubans and African Americans, 270 Cumming v. Richmond County Board of Education, 276 Defense industry desegregation, 277 Demographic trends, 283 Disfranchisement laws in Mississippi, 294

Volume 2 Fugitive Slave Law of 1850, 387 Fullilove v. Klutznick, 391 Gerrymandering, 393 Gomillion v. Lightfoot, 397 Grandfather clauses, 398 Great Migration, 399 Green v. County School Board of New Kent County, 404 Greensboro sit-ins, 406 Griffin v. Breckenridge, 413 Griggs v. Duke Power Company, 415 Groves v. Slaughter, 417

Grovey v. Townsend, 418 Guinn v. United States, 419 Haitians, 421 Hampton-Clark deaths, 424 Harlem Renaissance, 426 Harlins murder, 434 Harper v. Virginia Board of Elections, 435 Harpers Ferry raid, 436 Hawkins murder, 441 Heart of Atlanta Motel v. United States, 442 x

Complete List of Contents The Media, 569 Miami riots, 576 Military, 579 Military desegregation, 583 Milliken v. Bradley, 592 Million Man March, 593 Million Woman March, 597 Miscegenation laws, 600 Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party, 603 Missouri Compromise, 606 Missouri ex rel. Gaines v. Canada, 612 Mobile v. Bolden, 613 Montgomery bus boycott, 614 Moore v. Dempsey, 619 Moose Lodge v. Irvis, 620 MOVE bombing, 621 Moynihan Report, 623 Music, 624 Nation of Islam, 631 National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders, 635 National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, 636 National Association for the Advancement of Colored People Legal Defense and Educational Fund, 643 National Association for the Advancement of Colored People v. Alabama, 650 National Association of Colored Women, 651 National Black Women’s Political Leadership Caucus, 652 National Coalition of Blacks for Reparations in America, 653 National Council of Colored People, 654 National Council of Negro Women, 658 National Urban League, 659

“I Have a Dream” speech, 449 Integration, 454 Irish and African Americans, 460 Jackson’s run for the presidency, 461 Jamaicans, 466 Jews and African Americans, 470 Jim Crow laws, 476 Jones v. Alfred H. Mayer Company, 479 Journey of Reconciliation, 481 Kansas-Nebraska Act, 490 Katzenbach v. McClung, 496 Kerner Commission, 499 Keyes v. Denver School District No. 1, 506 King assassination, 507 King beating case, 515 Koreans and African Americans, 520 Ku Klux Klan, 523 Ku Klux Klan Acts, 529 Lassiter v. Northampton County Board of Elections, 530 League of Revolutionary Black Workers, 530 The Liberator, 532 Literature, 537 Little Rock school desegregation crisis, 544 Los Angeles riots, 548 Louisville, New Orleans, and Texas Railway Company v. Mississippi, 552 Lynching, 553 McCleskey v. Kemp, 557 McLaurin v. Oklahoma State Regents for Higher Education, 558 Malcolm X assassination, 559 Marshall’s appointment to the Supreme Court, 564 Martin v. Wilks, 568 xi

African American History Poll taxes, 723 Poor People’s March on Washington, 725 Powell v. Alabama, 727 Powers v. Ohio, 728 President’s Committee on Civil Rights, 729 Proslavery argument, 731 R.A.V. v. City of St. Paul, 735 Race riots of 1866, 737 Race riots of 1943, 741 Race riots of 1967, 745 Race riots of the twentieth century, 750 Rainbow Coalition, 753 Reconstruction, 755 Reitman v. Mulkey, 763 Republic of New Africa, 765 Restrictive covenants, 766 Roots, 767 Runyon v. McCrary, 768 School desegregation, 770 Science and technology, 776

Native Americans and African Americans, 661 Negro Conventions, 667 New York City slave revolt, 669 New York riots, 674 Newark riot, 677 Newberry v. United States, 679 Niagara Movement, 681 Nixon v. Condon, 685 Nixon v. Herndon, 686 Norris v. Alabama, 687 The North Star, 689 Northwest Ordinance, 694 One-drop rule, 698 Orangeburg massacre, 699 Palmer v. Thompson, 700 Pan-Africanism, 701 Patterson v. McLean Credit Union, 702 Pennsylvania Society for the Abolition of Slavery, 703 Plessy v. Ferguson, 708 Politics and government, 713

Volume 3 Slavery and the justice system, 850 Slavery and women, 858 Slavery in Massachusetts, 865 Slavery in Virginia, 870 Smith v. Allwright, 875 Southern Christian Leadership Conference, 879 Southern Manifesto, 887 Sports, 889 Stereotypes, 898 Stono Rebellion, 902 Strauder v. West Virginia, 907 Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, 908 Summit Meeting of National Negro Leaders, 912

Scott v. Sandford, 783 Scottsboro trials, 786 Segregation, 790 Segregation on the frontier, 793 Selma-Montgomery march, 797 Separate but equal doctrine, 805 Sharecropping, 806 Shaw v. Hunt, 808 Shaw v. Reno, 810 Shelley v. Kraemer, 812 Simpson murder trial, 813 Sit-ins, 818 Slaughterhouse Cases, 819 Slave codes, 821 Slavery, 826 Slavery and families, 835 Slavery and race relations, 843 xii

Complete List of Contents University of Mississippi desegregation, 974 Vietnam War, 979 Voting Rights Act of 1965, 983 Voting Rights Act of 1975, 990 Washington v. Davis, 996 Washington, D.C., riots, 997 Watts riot, 999 West Indians, 1002 White Citizens’ Councils, 1007 White primaries, 1009 Wilder’s election to Virginia governorship, 1010 Williams v. Mississippi, 1017 Wisconsin v. Mitchell, 1018 World War II, 1020 Yarbrough, Ex parte, 1025

Swann v. Charlotte-Mecklenberg Board of Education, 913 Sweatt v. Painter, 917 Talented Tenth, 919 Terry v. Adams, 921 Thirteenth Amendment, 922 Thomas-Hill hearings, 928 Three-fifths compromise, 930 Till lynching, 931 Turner’s slave insurrection, 933 Tuskegee Airmen, 937 Tuskegee experiment, 939 Twenty-fourth Amendment, 941 Underground Railroad, 947 Understanding tests, 952 United Negro College Fund, 953 United States Commission on Civil Rights, 954 United States v. Classic, 958 United States v. Cruikshank, 959 United States v. Reese, 961 United Steelworkers of America v. Weber, 962 Universal Negro Improvement Association, 969

Bibliography, 1027 Time Line of African American History, 1076 Notable Figures in African American History, 1096 Category Index, 1127 Personages Index, 1143 Subject Index, 1153

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Publisher’s Note This three-volume contribution to Salem Press’s Magill’s Choice series offers comprehensive coverage of the history of African Americans in the United States, from the arrival of the first African immigrants in British North America in 1619 through the first years of the twenty-first century. African American History’s alphabetically arranged essays cover the full sweep of the African American experience in North America, with articles on the major economic, political, legal, social, and cultural events and developments of nearly four centuries of history. Subject Matter Individual essays in African American History range in length from 200 to more than 3,000 words and average nearly 1,000 words each. The diverse subject matter covered in these volumes ranges from the origins of the peoples who make up the modern African American population to the impact of African Americans on present-day American culture and society. While the range of subjects covered is broad, the set has an unavoidable emphasis on rights issues. For, just as the history of African Americans has been dominated by struggles for freedom and equal rights, articles in African American History emphasize such issues as slavery (25 essays), the abolitionist movement (11), and civil rights (56). The set also has 33 essays on topics relating to discrimination and 26 essays on voting rights. Other subject areas covered in these volumes include arts and entertainment (9 essays), Black nationalism (13), crime and punishment (14), demographics (12), economic issues (10), education (21), military history (10), politics and government (12), the Reconstruction era (18), religion (9), riots and civil disturbances (14), and women’s issues (8). The history of the African American struggle for equal rights is closely tied to the history of U.S. Supreme Court decisions. With the set’s emphasis on rights issues, it should thus not be surprising that 71 essays are on specific Supreme Court decisions and another 24 are on federal laws. There are also 113 essays on specific events and eras, 42 on organizations and government xv

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agencies, and 50 on such broad subjects as demographics, economic history, the entertainment industry, integration, literature, the military, music, and politics and government. Information on individual personages in African American history is consolidated in the Biographical Directory in the appendix section of volume 3. The directory offers substantial entries on more than 100 notable figures from all periods of African American history and emphasize their individual places in black history. To tie African American History’s subjects together, the set is introduced by an original essay on African American historiography written by Professor Carl L. Bankston III, the editor of the set. In addition to the Biographical Directory, the appendix section at the end of volume 3 includes an extensive and up-to-date general Bibliography and a Time Line of African American history. Using This Set Each of the alphabetically arranged articles in African American History opens with the type of ready-reference top matter for which Salem Press’s reference works are well known. Except in a small number of articles on subjects that require no explanation— such as Agriculture, Economic trends, and Education—the first entry following every title is a brief passage that defines or identifies the article’s subject. Articles on such subjects as events, court cases, organizations, and laws have additional entries that provide dates and places, as relevant. The next item in every article is a brief italicized statement summarizing its subject’s significance. Readers can thus see the most essential information about every topic at a glance. Boldface subheads help guide readers through longer articles, and most articles are followed by up-to-date Further Reading notes. Additional bibliographical help can be found in the general bibliography at the end of volume 3. African American History offers several features to help readers find the information they need. The first and most obvious feature is the alphabetical arrangement of the essays, whose titles are worded to make finding topics as straightforward as possible. Readers may either go directly to the articles they seek or look for xvi

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them in the complete list of contents that can found at the front of every volume. Readers who cannot find what they need in the article titles will find substantial additional help in the set’s detailed indexes of personages and general subjects at the end of volume 3. Volume 3 also has a Category Index which should help readers who are uncertain under what headings they should look. Finally, every article is followed by a list of cross-references to other articles on closely related subjects. Readers are encouraged to follow the paths that these cross-references provide. Acknowledgments About one-half of the 293 essays in African American History are taken from Salem’s Racial and Ethnic Relations in America, which was published in 1999. The rest come from ten other Salem reference sets that include, most notably, Great Events from History: North American Series (1997), Great Events from History II: Human Rights (1992), Encyclopedia of the U.S. Supreme Court (2000), and The Sixties in America (1999). Bibliographical notes from those sets have been updated as necessary, and ten entirely new articles have been added. As always, the editors of Salem Press wish to thank the many scholars whose contributions make publications such as these possible. More than 155 scholars contributed the articles in African American History. The editors would also like to thank the project’s editor, Carl L. Bankston III of Tulane University. In addition to overseeing the project and writing the Introduction, Professor Bankston also wrote most of the new material appearing in this set.

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Introduction to African American History The techniques, approaches, themes, and theories that historians employ in their work are collectively known as historiography. Historiography recognizes that the discipline of history itself is a historical product. An African American historiography looks at how historians have thought and written about African American history. It also looks at the subjects and issues that have distinguished African American history from American history in general and at how African American history is connected to American history. Most readers of this three-volume set are probably interested in specific topics in the history of African Americans. As they use this comprehensive work, however, they may want to remember that the topics covered in it are not here simply for their writers to set forth. They have emerged from more than a century of reflection on the past of African Americans by historians and the public. For this reason, I want to introduce these volumes with a brief discussion of how African American history has been studied and presented and the issues that have concerned those writing in this area. I will begin by examining how the discipline of African American history has developed, and then discuss the major issues that recur through this branch of history. Generations of African American Historians One of the most influential descriptions of the development of African American history comes from the work of the distinguished scholar John Hope Franklin. Franklin has argued that African American historians can be divided into four generations, from the late nineteenth century through the end of the twentieth century. The first generation of historians consisted mainly of nonprofessional historians concerned with explaining how African Americans fit into American society. George Washington Williams (1849-1891) is often considered the first true scholar of African xix

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American history. Educated as a minister and with a background in politics, Williams trained himself in techniques of historical research. With an extensive investigation into primary sources, he published the two-volume History of the Negro Race in America from 1619 to 1880 in 1882. An ardent advocate of integration, Williams was concerned with presenting African Americans as Americans. Although there were arguably no other major scholars of African American history in Franklin’s first generation, the study of African American history attracted a great deal of interest. In Philadelphia, a group founded the American Negro Historical Society in 1897. A little over a decade later, in 1911, African American New Yorkers founded the Negro Society for Historical Research. In these groups, readers and writers were driven by the desire to find a positive identity for members of the racial group, and to locate African Americans within American society. Franklin dates the second generation of African American historians from around 1915, with the publication of The Negro, by W. E. B. Du Bois, in that year, and with the founding of the Journal of Negro History the following year. The most important figure of this second generation was Carter G. Woodson, the new journal’s first editor. Woodson is regarded by some historiographers as the true founder of African American history, since he brought together historians interested in the field and published their articles in his journal. He also encouraged them to write books and manuscripts, which he helped to publish through Associated Publishers, of which he was executive director. Woodson’s own first major book was The Negro in Our History (1922). His bestknown book today is probably The Mis-Education of the Negro, first published in 1933, which criticized the inattention to black history and its misleading portrayal in American schools. This second generation (which some scholars consider to have been the first generation) of historians was overwhelmingly concerned with the achievements of African Americans in politics, art, music, and other areas. To a large extent, its historians were reacting against the negative portrayals of African Americans in mainstream history and in educational institutions. Writing in a time when segregation and discrimination had been institutionxx

Introduction to African American History

alized and even legally prescribed in many parts of the nation, the second generation of historians attempted to bring to light parts of the past that most white scholars overlooked. Franklin dates his third generation in African American history to around 1935. Its characteristic work was again published by Du Bois, whose long career spanned many changes and who was a sociologist and political activist as much as a historian. Du Bois’s Black Reconstruction, first published in 1935, emphasized cooperation between black and white people during the Reconstruction era in the South. A primary area of interest to historians of this generation was how black and white Americans have interacted and dealt with one another. Accordingly, many white historians began working in African American history during this time and published their research in journals devoted to the field. Historians of this third generation were among those who laid the groundwork for the Civil Rights movement of the 1950’s and 1960’s, and participated in it. Franklin’s fourth generation began around 1970. Made up of well-trained and primarily academic historians, this late twentiethcentury generation was distinguished by the range of topics it studied and by the fact that African American history was, by then, considered an integral part of mainstream history, even as it continued to criticize the mainstream. Popular demand for African American history, small at the beginning of the twentieth century, had become great by the century’s end and this led to a deluge of books on the subject. The fourth generation saw the rise of black, or African American, studies programs as an academic discipline, frequently with political implications, and African American history often became part of this new discipline. African American studies gave rise to calls for Afrocentric perspectives on the past and future. For many historians, this meant that the primary task was no longer to identify African American history within American history, but to work from the premise that African Americans were at the center of American history. Some scholars have suggested that a new generation is now emerging from Afrocentric historians, one that will deal with African Americans not simply as participants in the nation’s history, but as creators of it. xxi

African American History

Across these generations, a number of topics have frequently predominated. These topics are well covered within the three volumes of African American History. At least three major issues tend to cut across most discussions of African American history: slavery and its heritage, the rural and urban backgrounds of African Americans, and racism. Slavery and Its Heritage Slavery is one of the key topics across all generations of African American historians, and it intersects with most other topics. One of the issues in the writing on slavery has been its impact on African American culture. Many historians, from the beginning, have maintained that slavery basically destroyed African culture and left slaves psychologically isolated and demoralized. An early challenge to this point of view can be found in the work of the Jewish American anthropologist Melville Herskovits, who argued in The Myth of the Negro Past (1941), that African Americans had, in fact, preserved much of their African culture through slavery. During the 1950’s, historians Kenneth Stampp and Stanley Elkins published influential works arguing that slavery left such deep psychological scars on the slaves themselves that it damaged social institutions that the slaves passed on to their free black descendants. A long line of African American historians have concentrated on slave revolts and resistance to slavery to counter the view of slaves as damaged, helpless, and docile. Toward the end of the 1960’s and into the 1970’s, especially, historians reacted against claims that slavery had damaged African Americans culturally and psychologically. More recently, Ira Berlin, in works such as Generations of Captivity: A History of African American Slaves (2003), has offered evidence that slavery varied greatly from one region to another and that therefore the impact of slavery on African American culture varied by region. The influence of slavery on families has been an especially controversial issue for historians. The African American social scientist E. Franklin Frazier, in The Negro Family in the United States (1939), presented family instability and a tendency toward single-parent families as a consequence of slavery. This was later countered by Herbert Gutman’s Black Family in Slavery and Freexxii

Introduction to African American History

dom: 1750-1925 (1976). Gutman offered evidence that slavery actually strengthened black families. Relationships between slaves and masters have been another hotly debated subject in historical writing on slavery. In the early part of the twentieth century, mainstream white historians often presented slavemasters as largely paternalistic, almost benevolent. Reacting to this, African American historians tended to emphasize the horrors of slavery. Insights into the brutal nature of slavery came from interviews with former slaves conducted as part of the Federal Writers Project during the 1930’s, and these interviews became essential primary sources for later historians. In 1974, Robert Fogel and Stanley Engerman published Time on the Cross, a statistical analysis of slavery that suggested it was actually a profitable and productive institution. Although Fogel and Engerman meant to emphasize black achievements through adversity, their work impressed some as an apology for slavery. Time on the Cross began a new round of historical investigations into how brutal master-slave relationships really were. Rural and Urban Backgrounds As the essay on demographic trends shows in the following pages, the African American experience in the years that followed slavery was one of a transformation from a mostly rural, agricultural population to a mostly urban one. Generally, the early second-generation historical works concerned with African Americans in urban settings concentrated on the movement from the countryside to the city. Negro Migration During the Great War (1920), by Emmett J. Scott, considered why African Americans had left the rural South for the cities during World War I and what that meant for their urban destinations. Many of the historical works that followed were concerned with the problems faced by African Americans in large cities, and they tended to concentrate on places such as Harlem and Chicago, which held the greatest black populations. Toward the end of Franklin’s third generation of historians, the development of ghettos became a topic of increased interest among scholars. Gilbert Osofsky’s Harlem: The Making of a Ghetto (1966) and Allan H. Spear’s Black Chicago: The Making of a Negro xxiii

African American History

Ghetto, 1890-1920 (1967) addressed concerns generated by the urban riots of the 1960’s. In the years following, the development and maintenance of racial segregation in American cities became a central issue among historians and social scientists. Racism Racism is intertwined with nearly all areas of study in African American history, from its origins during the slavery era to its continuing influence on American society in modern times. The enthusiasm of African American historians for promoting black achievements during Woodson’s era stemmed from a conscious desire to counter the negative views of African Americans in mainstream history. For example, Du Bois’s Black Reconstruction (1935) responded to portrayals of African Americans as passive and corrupt during the Reconstruction period. Du Bois ended Black Reconstruction with a chapter criticizing the distorted portrayal of African Americans in history books. Historian Robert W. Logan (1897-1982), an associate of both Woodson and Du Bois enjoyed a long career as a historian. The historical impact of white racism on African Americans was a central theme in all his writings. One of the key questions among historians dealing with racism has been how racist attitudes have been connected to social structures. In White Supremacy: A Comparative Study in American and South African History (1981), George M. Fredrickson argued that the institution of slavery created racism. Historians dealing with urbanization have often studied how racial attitudes led to racially segregated cities, even in the North. Studies of family and class position among African Americans have emphasized that these cannot be understood without taking white supremacy and racial prejudice into consideration. Carl L. Bankston III Further Reading The best approach to African American historiography would be to read widely and deeply in the field. However, a good overview of the historiography can be found in The State of Afro-American History: Past, Present, and Future (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State xxiv

Introduction to African American History

University Press, 1986), edited by Darlene Clark Hine. That book’s chapter “On the Evolution of Scholarship in Afro-American History” by John Hope Franklin is particularly recommended. The African American Experience: An Historiographical and Bibliographical Guide (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 2001), edited by Arvarh E. Strickland and Robert E. Weems, Jr., looks at historical writing in twelve of the major topics in African American history. Black History and the Historical Profession, 1915-1980 (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1986), by August Meier and Elliott Rudwick, offers five essays on the development of African American history. The essay on the career of Carter G. Woodson is especially useful for an understanding of the field. Carl L. Bankston III Tulane University

xxv

Contributors McCrea Adams Independent Scholar

J. Quinn Brisben Independent Scholar

Mary Welek Atwell Radford University

Michael H. Burchett Limestone College

Barbara Bair Library of Congress

Byron D. Cannon University of Utah

Carl L. Bankston III Tulane University

Glenn Canyon Independent Scholar

Bernice McNair Barnett University of Illinois at Urbana

Sharon Carson University of North Dakota

Paul Barton-Kriese Indiana University

Erica Childs Fordham University

Alvin K. Benson Utah Valley State College

John G. Clark University of Kansas

S. Carol Berg College of St. Benedict

Thomas Clarkin University of Texas

Milton Berman University of Rochester

Robert Cole Utah State University

Cynthia A. Bily Adrian College

William H. Coogan University of Southern Maine

Steve D. Boilard Independent Scholar

Tom Cook Wayne State College

James J. Bolner Louisiana State University, Baton Rouge

William J. Cooper, Jr. Louisiana State University, Baton Rouge

Aubrey W. Bonnett State University of New York, Old Westbury

Stephen Cresswell West Virginia Wesleyan College xxvii

African American History Laura A. Croghan College of William and Mary Edward R. Crowther Adams State College Gilbert Morris Cuthbertson Rice University Richard V. Damms Mississippi State University Sudipta Das Southern University at New Orleans Jane Davis Fordham University Theresa R. Doggart University of Tennessee, Chattanooga Davison M. Douglas William and Mary Law School Paul E. Doutrich York College of Pennsylvania Jennifer Eastman Clark University Robert P. Ellis Worcester State College Daryl R. Fair College of New Jersey John W. Fiero University of Southwestern Louisiana

Alan M. Fisher California State University, Dominguez Hills John C. Gardner Louisiana State University, Baton Rouge Karen Garner University of Texas at Austin Phyllis B. Gerstenfeld California State University, Stanislaus Richard A. Glenn Millersville University Robert F. Gorman Southwest Texas State University Lewis L. Gould University of Texas at Austin William H. Green University of Missouri, Columbia Jimmie F. Gross Armstrong State College Michael Haas University of Hawaii at Manoa Pamela D. Haldeman Mount St. Mary’s College Irwin Halfond McKendree College Roger D. Hardaway Northwestern Oklahoma State University

Brian L. Fife Ball State University xxviii

Contributors Claude Hargrove Fayetteville State University

Beth Kraig Pacific Lutheran University

Keith Harper Mississippi College

Jeri Kurtzleben University of Northern Iowa

Katy Jean Harriger Wake Forest University

M. Bahati Kuumba Buffalo State College

William M. Harris, Sr. Jackson State University

Linda Rochell Lane Tuskegee University

Stanley Harrold South Carolina State University

Eleanor A. LaPointe Ocean County College

James Hayes-Bohanan University of Arizona

Sharon L. Larson University of Nebraska at Lincoln

Ronald W. Howard Mississippi College

Abraham D. Lavender Florida International University

John Jacob Northwestern University

Jama Lazerow Wheelock College

Robert Jacobs Central Washington University

Thomas Tandy Lewis Anoka-Ramsey Community College

Ron Jacobs University of Vermont

Matthew Lindstrom Siena College

Duncan R. Jamieson Ashland University

Janet Alice Long Independent Scholar

Robert L. Jenkins Mississippi State University

Anne C. Loveland Louisiana State University, Baton Rouge

K. Sue Jewell Ohio State University Mabel Khawaja Hampton University

William C. Lowe Mount St. Clare College Robert D. Lukens University of Delaware

Kathleen Odell Korgen William Paterson University xxix

African American History Siobhan McCabe Siena College

Max C. E. Orezzoli Florida International University

Grace McEntee Appalachian State University

William Osborne Florida International University

Robert E. McFarland North Georgia College

Jason Pasch Independent Scholar

Susan Mackey-Kallis Villanova University

Craig S. Pascoe University of Tennessee, Knoxville

Paul D. Mageli Independent Scholar

Darryl Paulson University of South Florida

Jonathan Markovitz University of California, San Diego

Thomas R. Peake King College

Chogollah Maroufi California State University, Los Angeles

William E. Pemberton University of Wisconsin, La Crosse Marilyn Elizabeth Perry Independent Scholar

Thomas D. Matijasic Prestonsburg Community College

Doris F. Pierce Purdue University

Joseph A. Melusky Saint Francis College

Mark A. Plummer Illinois State University

Beth A. Messner Ball State University

Marjorie Podolsky Penn State University, Erie

Gregg L. Michel University of Virginia

David L. Porter William Penn College

William V. Moore College of Charleston

John Powell Penn State University, Erie

Charles H. O’Brien Western Illinois University

Steven J. Ramold University of Nebraska at Lincoln

Eileen O’Brien University of Florida

R. Kent Rasmussen Independent Scholar xxx

Contributors E. A. Reed Baylor University

James Smallwood Oklahoma State University

Douglas W. Richmond University of Texas, Arlington

Christopher E. Smith University of Akron

Barbara Roos Grand Valley State University

Ira Smolensky Monmouth College

Courtney B. Ross Louisiana State University, Baton Rouge

Mary Ellen Snodgrass Independent Scholar

Irene Struthers Rush Independent Scholar Dorothy C. Salem Cleveland State University Cuyahoga Community College Lisa M. Sardinia Pacific University Elizabeth D. Schafer Independent Scholar Larry Schweikart University of Dayton Terry L. Seip Louisiana State University, Baton Rouge

David L. Sterling University of Cincinnati Leslie Stricker Park College Robert Sullivan Independent Scholar James Tackach Roger Williams University Vanessa Tait University of California, Santa Cruz Harold D. Tallant Georgetown College G. Thomas Taylor University of Maine

R. Baird Shuman University of Illinois, UrbanaChampaign

Emily Teipe Fullerton College

Donald C. Simmons, Jr. Mississippi Humanities Council

Christel N. Temple University of Maryland

Donna Addkison Simmons Independent Scholar

Nancy Conn Terjesen Kent State University

xxxi

African American History Vincent Michael Thur Wenatchee Valley College

Lou Falkner Williams Kansas State University

Leslie V. Tischauser Prairie State College

Harry L. Wilson Roanoke College

Brian G. Tobin Lassen College

Richard L. Wilson University of Tennessee, Chattanooga

Mfanya D. Tryman Mississippi State University Annita Marie Ward Salem-Teikyo University Elwood David Watson East Tennessee State University William L. Waugh, Jr. Georgia State University Donald V. Weatherman Arkansas College Richard Whitworth Ball State University

Thomas Winter University of Cincinnati Michael Witkoski Independent Scholar Trudi D. Witonsky University of Wisconsin, Madison C. A. Wolski Independent Scholar Gene Redding Wynne, Jr. Tri-County Technical College Clifton K. Yearley State University of New York, Buffalo

xxxii

African American History

MAGILL’S C H O I C E

African American History Volume 2 Fugitive Slave Law of 1850 — Science and Technology

Edited by

Carl L. Bankston III Tulane University

Salem Press Inc. Pasadena, California

Hackensack, New Jersey

Frontispiece: Brochure promoting an exposition celebrating African American achievements since emancipation in 1865. (Library of Congress)

Copyright © 2006, by Salem Press, Inc. All rights in this book are reserved. No part of this work may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, without written permission from the copyright owner except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews. For information address the publisher, Salem Press, Inc., P.O. Box 50062, Pasadena, California 91115. ∞ The paper used in these volumes conforms to the American National Standard for Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, Z39.48-1992 (R1997) Some essays originally appeared in American Justice (1996), Encyclopedia of the U.S. Supreme Court (2000), Great Events from History II: Arts and Culture (1993), Great Events from History II: Human Rights (1992), Great Events from History: North American Series, Revised Edition (1997), Great Events of the 20th Century (2002), Racial and Ethnic Relations in America (2000), The Fifties in America (2005), The Sixties in America (1999), and Women's Issues (1997). New material has been added. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data African American history / edited by Carl L. Bankston, III. p. cm. -- (Magill's choice) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN-13: 978-1-58765-239-4 (set : alk. paper) ISBN-10: 1-58765-239-0 (set : alk. paper) ISBN-13: 978-1-58765-241-7 (v. 2 : alk. paper) ISBN-10: 1-58765-241-2 (v. 2 : alk. paper) [etc.] 1. African Americans--History. I. Bankston, Carl L. (Carl Leon), 1952II. Series. E185.A25355 2005 973'.0496073--dc22 2005015348 First Printing

printed in the united states of america

Contents Complete List of Contents . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . xliii Fugitive Slave Law of 1850 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 387 Fullilove v. Klutznick . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 391 Gerrymandering . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Gomillion v. Lightfoot . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Grandfather clauses . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Great Migration. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Green v. County School Board of New Kent County Greensboro sit-ins . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Griffin v. Breckenridge . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Griggs v. Duke Power Company . . . . . . . . . . . Groves v. Slaughter . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Grovey v. Townsend . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Guinn v. United States. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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Haitians . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Hampton-Clark deaths . . . . . . . . Harlem Renaissance . . . . . . . . . . Harlins murder . . . . . . . . . . . . . Harper v. Virginia Board of Elections . . Harpers Ferry raid . . . . . . . . . . . Hawkins murder . . . . . . . . . . . . Heart of Atlanta Motel v. United States .

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“I Have a Dream” speech . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 449 Integration. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 454 Irish and African Americans . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 460 Jackson’s run for the presidency Jamaicans . . . . . . . . . . . . . Jews and African Americans . . Jim Crow laws . . . . . . . . . . Jones v. Alfred H. Mayer Company Journey of Reconciliation . . . .

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Kansas-Nebraska Act . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 490 Katzenbach v. McClung . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 496 Kerner Commission . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 499 xxxix

African American History Keyes v. Denver School District No. 1 . King assassination . . . . . . . . . . King beating case . . . . . . . . . . . Koreans and African Americans . . Ku Klux Klan . . . . . . . . . . . . . Ku Klux Klan Acts . . . . . . . . . .

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Lassiter v. Northampton County Board of Elections League of Revolutionary Black Workers . . . . . The Liberator . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Literature . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Little Rock school desegregation crisis . . . . . . Los Angeles riots . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Louisville, New Orleans, and Texas Railway Company v. Mississippi. . . . . . . . . . . . . . Lynching. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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McCleskey v. Kemp. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . McLaurin v. Oklahoma State Regents for Higher Education . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Malcolm X assassination. . . . . . . . . . . . . Marshall’s appointment to the Supreme Court Martin v. Wilks . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Media . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Miami riots . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Military . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Military desegregation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Milliken v. Bradley . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Million Man March. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Million Woman March . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Miscegenation laws . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party . . . . Missouri Compromise . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Missouri ex rel. Gaines v. Canada . . . . . . . . . Mobile v. Bolden . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Montgomery bus boycott . . . . . . . . . . . . Moore v. Dempsey . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Moose Lodge v. Irvis . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . MOVE bombing . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Moynihan Report. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Music . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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Nation of Islam . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 631 National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders . . . . . . . . . 635 xl

Contents National Association for the Advancement of Colored People . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . National Association for the Advancement of Colored People Legal Defense and Educational Fund National Association for the Advancement of Colored People v. Alabama . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . National Association of Colored Women . . . . . . . . . National Black Women’s Political Leadership Caucus . . National Coalition of Blacks for Reparations in America National Council of Colored People . . . . . . . . . . . . National Council of Negro Women. . . . . . . . . . . . . National Urban League . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Native Americans and African Americans . . . . . . . . Negro Conventions. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . New York City slave revolt . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . New York riots . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Newark riot . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Newberry v. United States . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Niagara Movement. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Nixon v. Condon . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Nixon v. Herndon . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Norris v. Alabama . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The North Star . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Northwest Ordinance . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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One-drop rule . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 698 Orangeburg massacre . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 699 Palmer v. Thompson . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Pan-Africanism . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Patterson v. McLean Credit Union . . . . . . . . . . Pennsylvania Society for the Abolition of Slavery Plessy v. Ferguson . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Politics and government . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Poll taxes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Poor People’s March on Washington . . . . . . . . Powell v. Alabama . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Powers v. Ohio . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . President’s Committee on Civil Rights. . . . . . . Proslavery argument . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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R.A.V. v. City of St. Paul. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 735 Race riots of 1866 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 737 Race riots of 1943 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 741 xli

African American History Race riots of 1967 . . . . . . . . . . . Race riots of the twentieth century . Rainbow Coalition . . . . . . . . . . Reconstruction . . . . . . . . . . . . Reitman v. Mulkey . . . . . . . . . . . Republic of New Africa . . . . . . . Restrictive covenants. . . . . . . . . Roots . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Runyon v. McCrary . . . . . . . . . .

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745 750 753 755 763 765 766 767 768

School desegregation. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 770 Science and technology . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 776

xlii

African American History

MAGILL’S C H O I C E

African American History Volume 3 Scott v. Sandford — Yarbrough, Ex parte Appendices Indexes

Edited by

Carl L. Bankston III Tulane University

Salem Press Inc. Pasadena, California

Hackensack, New Jersey

Frontispiece: World War II recruiting poster using a Tuskegee airman to appeal to African Americans. (National Archives)

Copyright © 2006, by Salem Press, Inc. All rights in this book are reserved. No part of this work may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, without written permission from the copyright owner except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews. For information address the publisher, Salem Press, Inc., P.O. Box 50062, Pasadena, California 91115. ∞ The paper used in these volumes conforms to the American National Standard for Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, Z39.48-1992 (R1997) Some essays originally appeared in American Justice (1996), Encyclopedia of the U.S. Supreme Court (2000), Great Events from History II: Arts and Culture (1993), Great Events from History II: Human Rights (1992), Great Events from History: North American Series, Revised Edition (1997), Great Events of the 20th Century (2002), Racial and Ethnic Relations in America (2000), The Fifties in America (2005), The Sixties in America (1999), and Women's Issues (1997). New material has been added. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data African American history / edited by Carl L. Bankston, III. p. cm. -- (Magill's choice) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN-13: 978-1-58765-239-4 (set : alk. paper) ISBN-10: 1-58765-239-0 (set : alk. paper) ISBN-13: 978-1-58765-242-4 (v. 3 : alk. paper) ISBN-10: 1-58765-242-0 (v. 3 : alk. paper) [etc.] 1. African Americans--History. I. Bankston, Carl L. (Carl Leon), 1952II. Series. E185.A25355 2005 973'.0496073--dc22 2005015348 First Printing

printed in the united states of america

Contents Complete List of Contents . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . lvii Scott v. Sandford . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Scottsboro trials . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Segregation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Segregation on the frontier . . . . . . . . . . . . . Selma-Montgomery march . . . . . . . . . . . . . Separate but equal doctrine . . . . . . . . . . . . . Sharecropping . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Shaw v. Hunt. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Shaw v. Reno . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Shelley v. Kraemer . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Simpson murder trial . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Sit-ins . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Slaughterhouse Cases . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Slave codes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Slavery . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Slavery and families . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Slavery and race relations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Slavery and the justice system . . . . . . . . . . . Slavery and women . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Slavery in Massachusetts . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Slavery in Virginia . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Smith v. Allwright . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Southern Christian Leadership Conference . . . . Southern Manifesto . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Sports . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Stereotypes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Stono Rebellion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Strauder v. West Virginia . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee . . Summit Meeting of National Negro Leaders . . . Swann v. Charlotte-Mecklenberg Board of Education . Sweatt v. Painter . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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783 786 790 793 797 805 806 808 810 812 813 818 819 821 826 835 843 850 858 865 870 875 879 887 889 898 902 907 908 912 913 917

Talented Tenth . . . . . . Terry v. Adams . . . . . . . Thirteenth Amendment . Thomas-Hill hearings . . Three-fifths compromise. Till lynching . . . . . . . .

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African American History Turner’s slave insurrection . Tuskegee Airmen . . . . . . . Tuskegee experiment. . . . . Twenty-fourth Amendment .

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Underground Railroad. . . . . . . . . . . . . Understanding tests . . . . . . . . . . . . . . United Negro College Fund . . . . . . . . . . United States Commission on Civil Rights . United States v. Classic . . . . . . . . . . . . . United States v. Cruikshank . . . . . . . . . . . United States v. Reese . . . . . . . . . . . . . . United Steelworkers of America v. Weber . . . . Universal Negro Improvement Association . University of Mississippi desegregation . . .

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947 952 953 954 958 959 961 962 969 974

Vietnam War . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 979 Voting Rights Act of 1965 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 983 Voting Rights Act of 1975 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 990 Washington v. Davis . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 996 Washington, D.C., riots . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 997 Watts riot . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 999 West Indians . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1002 White Citizens’ Councils . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1007 White primaries . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1009 Wilder’s election to Virginia governorship. . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1010 Williams v. Mississippi . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1017 Wisconsin v. Mitchell . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1018 World War II . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1020 Yarbrough, Ex parte. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1025 Bibliography . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1027 Time Line of African American History . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1076 Notable Figures in African American History . . . . . . . . . . . . 1096 Category Index . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1127 Personages Index . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1143 Subject Index. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1153

lvi

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Abolition Definition: Efforts to abolish slavery The abolition movement attempted to apply the concepts of Christian brotherhood and democratic egalitarianism to race relations; it helped to end slavery in the United States. By the mid-eighteenth century, American Quakers such as John Woolman and Benjamin Lay were denouncing slavery as unChristian. The rationalism of the Enlightenment, with its stress upon natural law, added ammunition to the arsenal of critics of slavery. The egalitarian rhetoric of the Revolutionary era illustrated the irony of slaveholders fighting for liberty. As a result, most northern states abolished slavery by 1784. New York and New Jersey did so afterward. Southern whites believed that they could not afford to abolish slavery, yet they too felt the need to justify the institution on ethical grounds. They concentrated on humanizing the institution and argued that it was a “necessary evil.” Antislavery feeling receded after 1793 because of fear of slave revolts, the increasing profitability of slavery following the invention of the cotton gin, and new scientific theories that reinforced racism. The leading antislavery organization in the early nineteenth century was the American Colonization Society (ACS). The ACS attempted to resettle free blacks in Africa and encouraged voluntary emancipation without challenging the right to own human property. The colonization plan allowed liberal slaveholders and moderate members of the clergy to rationalize their guilt over slavery. In 1825, a great Protestant religious revival swept the northeastern region of the country. Ministers such as Charles Grandison Finney preached a new perfectionist theology that sought to counter the growing worldliness of Americans. This revival sparked a host of humanitarian crusades designed to protect the rights of the disadvantaged and to cleanse American institutions of contamination. By the early 1830’s, many evangelical reformers began to view slavery and racism as sinful because racism violated the Chris-

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The Oberlin Rescuers, an abolitionist body based in Oberlin, Ohio, in 1859. Oberlin was a major center of the abolitionist movement. (Library of Congress)

tian ethic of equality. Known as immediate abolitionists, these reformers demanded the immediate and unqualified liberation of slaves and an end to racial discrimination. With the formation of the American Anti-Slavery Society in 1833, abolitionist speakers toured the northern states attempting to rally support for their cause. Abolitionists were frequently attacked by angry mobs, and their literature was destroyed in southern post offices. The abolition movement failed to end racism in the North. It did, however, spark antisouthern feelings, which led to increased controversy within the national government. This conflict led directly to the Civil War (1861-1865). During the war, abolitionists pressured the federal government to transform the conflict from a war to preserve the Union into a war to end slavery. Abolition advocates were disappointed by the Emancipation Proclamation because it was based upon military necessity rather than moral principle, but they accomplished their central purpose with the passage of the Thirteenth Amendment, which ended slavery in the United States. Garrisonian Ethics One major faction within the abolition movement was led by editor William Lloyd Garrison. In a real sense, the publication of the first issue of The Liberator on January 1, 1831, established Garrison as the foremost abolitionist in the country. Garrison’s harsh attacks upon slaveholders and colonizationists caused a national sensation even though the circulation of his newspaper never exceeded three thousand.

Abolition

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Like all abolitionists, Garrison demanded that everyone recognize a personal responsibility to improve society. The three major tenets of his ethical philosophy were human liberation, moral suasion, and no compromise with evil. Garrison actively campaigned on behalf of legal equality for African Americans, temperance, and equality for women. Garrison rejected force and violence in human affairs. He sought the moral reformation of slave owners, not their destruction. He never advocated slave revolts, and he wanted the northern states to allow the South to secede during the crisis of 1860-1861. Garrison sincerely believed in all that he advocated, and he would not compromise his principles. He rejected any solution to the issue of slavery that involved a program that would delay emancipation. He also demanded that his followers reject participation in the American political system because the Constitution was a proslavery document. Other abolitionists, such as Gerrit Smith and James Birney, attempted to use the political system as a way to gain publicity for the cause of abolition. African American Abolitionism In a sense, there were two abolition movements. The white movement was based on a moral abstraction, but African Americans were forced to confront the everyday realities of racism in nineteenth century America. Frederick Douglass emerged as the major spokesperson for African Americans during the antebellum period. Douglass selfconsciously attempted to use his life as an example to repudiate racist stereotypes. Because of his eloquence, Douglass gained an international reputation as a public speaker, and in doing so, he proved the humanity of African Americans. Like Garrison, Douglass strongly supported temperance and women’s rights. He was, however, willing to use any means to achieve the liberation of slaves, including violence and political action. He approved of John Brown’s idea of using the southern Appalachians as an armed sanctuary for runaways. He also supported the Free-Soil and Republican Parties even though neither advocated the emancipation of southern slaves. He justified his positions as part of a larger struggle to advance the cause of racial

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equality in America. For Douglass, as for other African Americans involved in the cause of abolition, equality was the only acceptable ethical standard for a free society. Thomas D. Matijasic Further Reading Books that provide additional information on the abolition movement include, Kevin C. Julius’s The Abolitionist Decade, 18291838: A Year-by-Year History of Early Events in the Antislavery Movement (Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland & Co., 2004), Stanley Harrold’s The Rise of Aggressive Abolitionism: Addresses to the Slaves (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2004), Harrold’s Subversives: Antislavery Community in Washington, D.C., 1828-1865 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2003), Richard S. Newman’s The Transformation of American Abolitionism: Fighting Slavery in the Early Republic (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002), Gilbert Hobbs Barnes’s The Antislavery Impulse: 1830-1844 (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1964), The Antislavery Vanguard: New Essays on the Abolitionists (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1965), edited by Martin Duberman, Gerald Sorin’s Abolitionism: A New Perspective (New York: Praeger, 1972), James Brewer Stewart’s Holy Warriors: The Abolitionists and American Slavery (Rev. ed. New York: Hill & Wang, 1996), and Alice Felt Tyler’s Freedom’s Ferment: Phases of American Social History to 1860 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1944). Nathan Irvin Huggins’s Slave and Citizen: The Life of Frederick Douglass (Boston: Little, Brown, 1980) looks at the African American abolitionist, and Henry Mayer’s All on Fire: William Lloyd Garrison and the Abolition of Slavery (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1998) and Russel B. Nye’s William Lloyd Garrison and the Humanitarian Reformers (Boston: Little, Brown, 1955) examine the prominent white abolitionist. See also American Anti-Slavery Society; American Colonization Society; Amistad slave revolt; Antislavery laws of 1777 and 1807; Clotilde capture; Emancipation Proclamation; Harpers Ferry raid; Liberator, The; National Council of Colored People; Negro Conventions; North Star, The; Slavery; Thirteenth Amendment; Underground Railroad

Abolitionist movement and women

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Abolitionist movement and women Conflict over women’s role in the abolitionist movement, which sought the immediate emancipation of slaves and an end to the institution of slavery, led to the women’s rights movement. Abolition emerged as a social movement in the United States by the early 1830’s. U.S. women witnessed the example of British women in their call for total emancipation in the 1820’s and 1830’s, during which time more than a million people (mostly women) signed petitions for Parliament and prayed for the end of slavery. British women used passive resistance, free-produce societies, and active abolitionist tactics. Anne Knight and Marie Tothill gathered 187,000 women’s signatures and achieved their goal of freeing 800,000 West Indian slaves in 1833. Much of the early antislavery movement reflected the influence of the Society of Friends (Quakers), whose leaders, John Woolman and Anthony Benezet, opposed slavery in the late eighteenth century. Benjamin Lundy, a Quaker, became one of the first traveling antislavery lecturers and founded the antislavery paper Genius of Universal Emancipation in 1821. As early as 1829, Quaker Elizabeth Margaret Chandler, the first female correspondent for an antislavery publication, used her column, “Female Department,” to urge U.S. women to take a strong stand against slavery. The U.S. movement had ties to the British antislavery crusade. The associate editor of Lundy’s paper was William Lloyd Garrison. On January 1, 1831, Garrison founded his own antislavery newspaper in Boston, The Liberator, which called for immediate emancipation without compensation to slaveowners. That same year, Prudence Crandall came to Canterbury, Connecticut, to establish a select school for young ladies. By 1833, she had opened the school to “young colored Ladies and Misses.” When the town arrested her, abolitionists provided bond. Her problems drew the support of Garrison; the Tappan brothers, Arthur, Benjamin, and Lewis; and Samuel May. Her case became one of the most celebrated incidents in the denial of abolitionist civil rights. Antislavery delegates from throughout the Northeast gathered in Philadelphia to form the American Anti-Slavery Society in 1833.

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The national abolitionist movement emerged from strong reform foundations. Foundations for Reform By the 1820’s and 1830’s, women in the United States had become increasingly aware of how the concept of “separate spheres” for the sexes restricted the role of women in social reform movements. Nevertheless, many women were able to use their perceived moral superiority to work in religious, charitable, and educational organizations. To avoid conflict over the issue of integrated female participation in reform, women participated through ladies’ societies. Female moral reform societies addressed such issues as prostitution, male licentiousness, and double standards. Temperance became a women’s issue, because a husband’s drinking could drain the family income, lead to domestic abuse and neglect, and threaten the stability of civilized life. The most political of all reforms was abolition, a movement to abolish slavery. Quaker women were early leaders in the abolitionist movement. The beliefs of the Society of Friends encouraged egalitarianism, in which all souls were considered equal in the eyes of God. Quaker women exercised leadership as ministers, testified in front of mixed male and female audiences, and supervised the spiritual life of other women through meetings that expanded women’s roles beyond the spiritual community. In 1828, the Hicksite Quakers split from their more traditional fellows and advocated a boycott of slave-produced goods. The general divisions in the antislavery movement included the Garrisonians, evangelicals, and political abolitionists. The Garrisonians called for immediate emancipation, racial civil equality, and moral suasion as the means to persuade others to their cause. Rejecting gradualism, colonization, and political action, the Garrisonians embraced absolute human equality, criticized the institutions of organized religion and slavery, and used inflammatory rhetoric and tactics. The evangelicals remained committed to a conventional, revivalistic Christianity. The political abolitionists were directly involved in political activity in the establishment of third parties such as the Liberty Party, the Free Soil Party, and the Republican Party. Women were most active in the

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Garrisonian wing, because they were accepted there as equal participants. Women also worked through female free-produce societies and separate female auxiliaries. Female Free-Produce Societies Free-produce unions promoted the manufacture and marketing of goods made entirely by free labor by boycotting products associated with slave labor. The free-produce movement was both racially and sexually segregated in the 1830’s, as were the majority of abolition societies. Female free-produce societies tried to encourage other women not to purchase slave produce, such as cotton, sugar, molasses, rice, and tobacco, in order to put pressure on the slave-based economy of the South and the markets for such goods in the North. Members of free-produce societies patronized shops selling products and goods produced by free labor. Drinking tea without sweeteners, wearing coarse cloth without cotton, and avoiding foods from the South raised the consciousness of women and their families to their dependence upon slave labor, producing more of a moral than an economic impact. Female Antislavery Societies At first, only men addressed the members of antislavery societies, but soon women began to publish their own tracts and to speak. African American women were the first to organize antislavery societies, from their earlier religious, moral, benevolent, or literary societies. The first U.S.-born woman to deliver public antislavery lectures to mixed audiences was Maria Stewart, a black woman, in 1831. In 1832, Stewart called her “daughters of Africa” to dedicate their lives to abolition. In February, 1832, African American women in Salem, Massachusetts, joined together to form the first women’s abolitionist society. Female societies emerged in towns throughout the Northeast, with leaders including Charlotte Forten, Harriet Jacobs, Sarah Douglass, and Sarah Parker Remond. By October, 1832, the Boston Female Antislavery Society began its work. It was followed by more than one hundred women’s antislavery societies during the 1830’s. Influenced by Garrison’s abolitionism, Lydia Maria Child called for women to enter the fight against slavery in 1833, with An Appeal

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Abolitionist movement and women

in Favor of That Class of Americans Called Africans. Garrison helped form the Philadelphia Female Anti-Slavery Society in December, 1833. Humanitarian Lucretia Mott, a member of a Hicksite group of the Society of Friends, had attended a meeting of the newly formed American Anti-Slavery Society with three other women. Seeking greater participation, however, she soon joined with other Quakers and seven women of color to form the Philadelphia Female Anti-Slavery Society. Women throughout the Northeast held meetings, organized societies, raised money, supported antislavery publications, and circulated petitions for the antislavery cause. Soon petitions called for Congress to put an immediate end to slavery in the District of Columbia. By 1837, The Liberator noted that the women of New England had sent nearly twice as many petitions to Congress as had the men. Centered in New England, the female antislavery societies spread to New York and the West, especially in northeastern Ohio, an area settled by New Englanders. Garrisonian abolitionism gained followers, leading to the formation of the Ohio AntiSlavery Society in 1835. In Quaker regions such as Salem, Ohio, men and women acted together and formed integrated societies. By January, 1836, Ohio women were entering the abolition movement. That summer, the American Anti-Slavery Society appointed two female agents to serve as speakers and propagandists. The speaking tour of Sarah and Angelina Grimké, Quaker converts and daughters of a South Carolina slaveowner, produced a controversy that eventually split the antislavery movement and raised issues concerning the human rights of women. The Grimké sisters spoke to audiences throughout the Northeast. Among the young, idealistic women who heard or read their words and became converts to the antislavery cause were Lucy Stone, a young teacher in West Brookfield, Massachusetts, and Elizabeth Robinson, a young Quaker from Mount Pleasant, Ohio. The first national convention of female antislavery societies met in New York in May, 1837, to begin an extensive campaign. After hearing the Grimkés speak about their tour, the convention leaders asserted that women had the right to move into this sphere, which they believed Providence had assigned. The pioneers included both experienced and new leaders, including

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Mott; the Grimkés; Maria Weston Chapman, a volatile supporter of Garrison; Abby Kelley Foster, a Quaker school teacher from Lynn, Massachusetts, who would eventually leave teaching to become a full-time lecturer for antislavery; Susan Paul, the daughter of a Boston Baptist minister; and Forten and her daughters, founding members of the Philadelphia Female Anti-Slavery Society. The women met in national conventions two more times, both in Philadelphia, before women were accepted as equals in the American Anti-Slavery Society, eliminating the need for separate conventions thereafter. Women raised money by selling original texts, writing letters, conducting petition drives, hosting bake sales, holding antislavery fairs, and lecturing. Women’s work became increasingly essential to the antislavery movement as the decade progressed. As their presence became critical, the character of their roles came under scrutiny. The Woman Question The variety of ways that women participated in the abolition movement raised “the woman question.” Should women work through gender-integrated associations, or should they serve in a supportive role through female societies? This question had no universal answer. The role of women in the antislavery movement was a point of contention that led to a split in the movement: In May, 1840, the American Anti-Slavery Society split over the equal admission of women. Those who favored a separate role for women formed the American and Foreign Anti-Slavery Society, headed and financed by Lewis Tappan. The majority of evangelicals left the American Anti-Slavery Society for the American and Foreign Anti-Slavery Society so as to continue working within U.S. religious and political institutions. In June, 1840, the World Antislavery Conference in London rejected the credentials of U.S. female delegates. To further aggravate the official decision, the women were placed behind a screen to limit their participation. William Lloyd Garrison joined the women behind the screen to voice his disapproval. His demonstrated egalitarianism won militant women to his form of abolitionism.

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Women continued writing tracts, poetry, and columns for the antislavery cause. Harriet Beecher Stowe’s antislavery novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852) dramatized the cruelty of slavery and sold more than 300,000 copies in its first year of publication. A free woman of color, Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, used much of her income from her book of poetry Poems on Miscellaneous Subjects (1854) to support William Still and the Underground Railroad. Some women edited antislavery newspapers. In the 1840’s, Child edited the National Anti-Slavery Standard. By 1845, the AntiSlavery Bugle, edited by Jane Elizabeth Jones and her husband, Benjamin, carried the Garrisonian message and later served as the organ for the radical Western Anti-Slavery Society, formed in 1846. Following the passage of the Fugitive Slave Act in 1850, conditions worsened for free blacks and fugitive slaves. Many abolitionists advocated migration to Canada, where there was no slavery. For Ellen Craft, escape to Nova Scotia and then to England prevented her return to slavery. The Refugee Home Society, established by black Canadians and Michigan abolitionists, provided cheap land, self-government, and schooling to African Americans. Mary Ann Shadd Cary, the first black American female editor, established The Provincial Freeman in 1853 to encourage fifteen thousand free blacks and fugitive slaves to emigrate to Canada. The less restrictive life there did not include integrated education, however. Mary Bibb, the wife of fugitive slave Henry Bibb, taught black children in separate schools in Ontario, while she supported the antislavery wing led by Lewis Tappan. Following the examples of Stewart, the Grimké sisters, and Foster, many women became well-known lecturers. Stone, for example, entered Oberlin College to train in public oratory so she could become an antislavery lecturer. Free black women traveled the lecturing circuit. Harper launched her career as a lecturer with “Education and the Elevation of the Colored Race” in New Bedford, Massachusetts, in August, 1854. She became the first female orator for the Maine Anti-Slavery Society and, in 1857, spoke for the Pennsylvania Anti-Slavery Society. Remond, a member of several antislavery groups, started lecturing for the Ameri-

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can Anti-Slavery Society in 1856, traveling in the Northeast and in England, Scotland, and Ireland to support the cause of abolition. Former or fugitive slaves made excellent lecturers because of their firsthand experience with slavery. Many African American women were used on the antislavery lecture circuit to recount their miseries under slavery. (Light-skinned women were often sent out to lecture, to shock audiences into empathy with their plight.) One of the best-known speakers was Sojourner Truth, who was born a slave in New York State. Freed in 1826, she became an itinerant evangelist preacher who turned to antislavery issues, often sharing the platform with Frederick Douglass. Although she was illiterate, Truth used effective speaking techniques. Ellen Craft, a fugitive slave, lectured for the British and Foreign Freedman’s Aid Society to avoid recapture in the 1850’s and 1860’s. Harriet Tubman, also illiterate, was a speaker for the antislavery movement, in addition to her more noteworthy role as a conductor on the Underground Railroad, which led three hundred slaves to freedom in the 1850’s. Impact Women’s role in the abolitionist movement was critical to its spread and survival. Their support financed antislavery newspapers, lecture circuits, societies, and conventions. Their moral spirit guided both written and spoken arguments for immediate emancipation. Although most female antislavery societies fell within conventional notions of the woman’s sphere, many female leaders showed no fear in arousing public wrath to carry out antislavery functions. Their activities gave inspiration and apprenticeship to many advocates of women’s rights. The discussions about slave oppression raised awareness of racial and sexual oppression in the North. The Garrisonian abolitionism provided women with a worldview and a theoretical framework through which they could criticize social institutions. The antislavery movement also produced a political network of support among readers of antislavery newspapers, members of societies, and audiences who came to hear the speakers. Hence, the antislavery platform

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led both to the eventual gender and racial integration of the abolition movement and to the ultimate end to slavery. Women also gained the political expertise to develop an organized women’s rights movement. Dorothy C. Salem Further Reading Blackett, R. J. Building an Antislavery Wall: Black Americans in the Atlantic Abolitionist Movement, 1830-1860. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1989. Spans the ocean in the study of antislavery activity in Great Britain and the United States. Cooper, Afua. “The Search for Mary Bibb, Black Woman Teacher in Nineteenth-Century Canada West.” In “We Specialize in the Wholly Impossible”: A Reader in Black Women’s History, edited by Darlene Clark Hine, Wilma King, and Linda Reed. Brooklyn, N.Y.: Carlson, 1995. Studies the life of a freeborn black Quaker woman in Canada, who was a teacher and small businesswoman. Hansen, Debra Gold. Strained Sisterhood: Gender and Class in the Boston Female Anti-Slavery Society. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1993. Discusses the conflicts within one of the most famous women’s antislavery societies. Hersh, Blanche. The Slavery of Sex: Feminist-Abolitionists in America. Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1978. Shows the roots of women’s rights in the female leadership of abolitionism. Jeffrey, Julie Roy. The Great Silent Army of Abolitionism: Ordinary Women in the Antislavery Movement. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998. An examination of women’s antislavery societies and many of the women at the forefront of the movement. Kraditor, Aileen. Means and Ends in American Abolitionism. New York: Pantheon Books, 1969. An analytical study of the various abolitionist organizations and leadership, with particular emphasis on women’s roles. Silverman, Jason, and Donna Gillie. “’The Pursuit of Knowledge Under Difficulties’: Education and the Fugitive Slave in Canada.” Ontario History 74 (1982): 95-111. Details the segregated education of blacks who came to Canada seeking freedom.

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Sterling, Dorothy. We Are Your Sisters: Black Women in the Nineteenth Century. New York: W. W. Norton, 1984. One of the best collections of information about individual women and groups during the nineteenth century. Yee, Shirley. Black Women Abolitionists: A Study in Activism, 18281860. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1992. Discusses black female leadership in the abolitionist movement and the women’s perspectives of racial and gender discrimination. Yellin, Jean Fagan. Women and Sisters: The Antislavery Feminists in American Culture. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1989. Exposes the contradicting definitions between “true womanhood” and the role of women in the abolitionist movement. See also Abolition; Slavery; Slavery and women

Adarand Constructors v. Peña The Case: U.S. Supreme Court ruling on affirmative action Date: June 12, 1995 In this decision, the U.S. Supreme Court held that broad affirmative action programs involving employment and contracts were unconstitutional but preserved the applicability of affirmative action to specific and limited circumstances of discrimination. Randy Pech, a white contractor in Colorado Springs, Colorado, submitted the lowest bid for a federal road-repair project. The contract, however, was awarded to a company owned by a Latino man because of a 1987 law requiring that the Department of Transportation award at least 10 percent of its funds to companies owned by women or members of minority groups. Pech took his complaint to the courts. The case was decided by the Supreme Court at a time when criticism of affirmative action had become widespread both among the public and in Congress. In addition, the makeup of the Court itself had changed since the last federal affirmative action case in 1990; notably, Thurgood Marshall, a

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staunch liberal, had retired and been replaced by another African American jurist, Clarence Thomas, a conservative. Overturning previous decisions offering support of federal affirmative action, on June 12, 1995, the Court voted 5 to 4 that the type of affirmative action program involved in the case was unconstitutional. In an opinion written by Justice Sandra Day O’Connor, the Supreme Court stated that the Constitution protects individuals but was not intended to offer special protections to groups. Treating “any person unequally because of his or her race” causes the person to suffer an injury that is not acceptable under the Constitution’s guarantee of equal protection under the law. The law can treat people differently because of race “only for the most compelling reasons,” and racial classifications by government agencies are “inherently suspect and presumptively invalid.” The Court did say, however, that affirmative action programs could be acceptable to remedy specific, provable cases of discrimination. The decision severely undercut all federal affirmative action programs, most notably those involving jobs or contracts required to go to members of minority groups (“minority setasides”). In addition, federal law at the time of Adarand required firms that did more than fifty thousand dollars of business a year with the federal government and had more than fifty employees to have a written affirmative action policy, which meant that the Adarand decision could affect the policies of nearly all major employers in the United States. Reaction to the decision was strong and immediate. A leader of the Anti-Defamation League called it a “sea change” in the law. Many civil rights leaders protested the decision and urged the government not to abolish all affirmative action efforts. Conservative Republican leaders in Congress, in contrast, vowed to pass legislation to eliminate all racial preferences in federal hiring and contracting. McCrea Adams See also Affirmative action; Bakke case; Emancipation Proclamation; Fullilove v. Klutznick; Griggs v. Duke Power Company; Thirteenth Amendment; United Steelworkers of America v. Weber

Affirmative action

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Affirmative action Definition: Programs of governmental agencies or private institutions designed to provide members of racial and ethnic minorities and women with access to opportunities in education and employment Because of discrimination against women and minority members, governmental agencies, businesses, and educational institutions gave them special opportunities, which some people criticized as discriminating against nonminority members. A divided Supreme Court struggled with the question of when such programs are acceptable. Affirmative action is a highly controversial means of pursuing equal access to resources in education and employment. Although the term affirmative action first appeared in an official document in an executive order issued by President Lyndon B. Johnson in 1965, affirmative action did not emerge as a government policy until the 1970’s. In Griggs v. Duke Power Company (1971), the Supreme Court ruled that discrimination could be judged to exist when business practices resulted in limiting opportunities for members of minorities, even if there had been no evidence of intent to discriminate on the part of the employer. This altered the definition of discrimination, making it a matter of built-in racial bias. Duke Power Company required either a high-school diploma or a passing grade on a general intelligence test for a job in its power plant. Fewer black applicants than white applicants passed this test. The plaintiffs argued that in this case, educational credentials and test results had no direct relevance to job performance, so no justification existed for a job requirement that disproportionately affected members of the minority race. The Court, under Chief Justice Warren E. Burger, found that employment practices that exclude African American job seekers and are not related to job performance are indeed discriminatory. The concept of built-in discrimination established by Griggs helped lay the groundwork for political efforts to dismantle unintended barriers to full participation in American society. Affirmative action, according to the official government definition,

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Milestones in Affirmative Action Year

Event

Impact

1965

Executive Order 11246

Requires firms doing business in excess of $50,000 per year with the U.S. government to submit time tables and goals for diversifying their workforces.

1978

Regents of the University of California v. Bakke

Strikes down a policy that established a quota for minority admissions on grounds that it is unfair to a qualified white applicant (“reverse discrimination”).

1979

United Steelworkers of America v. Weber

Upholds an agreement between an employer and a union, establishing goals for minority inclusion in a training program on grounds that any harm done to white employees is temporary and does not create an absolute barrier to advancement.

1986

Wygant v. Jackson Board of Education

Holds that right of seniority may take precedence over affirmative action plans when workforce is reduced.

1991

Civil Rights Act

Modifies effects of Supreme Court rulings that increased burden of proof on plaintiffs.

1995

Adarand Constructors v. Peña

Holds that broad affirmative action programs involving employment and contracts are unconstitutional, but preserves the applicability of affirmative action to specific and limited circumstances of discrimination.

1996

Proposition 209

California voters approve Proposition 209, a measure that ends state-supported affirmative action. Opponents of affirmative action in other states are encouraged by the passage of this measure.

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involved action to overcome past or present barriers to equal opportunity. Two of the most obvious ways of overcoming such barriers were establishing quotas of minority members or women to be hired or admitted to educational programs and creating setasides, positions reserved for minority members or women. These remedies, however, met with challenges by those in groups not benefiting from affirmative action, who charged that they were suffering from officially sanctioned discrimination. In 1971 a Jewish man named DeFunis applied for admission to the University of Washington Law School but was rejected. The law school followed a practice of dividing its applicants into two categories, minority group members and majority group members, using lower standards for admitting minority group members. If DeFunis had been black, American Indian, or Latino, his test scores and grades would have gained him entry. He sued, claiming that his rights to equal legal protection, guaranteed by the Fourteenth Amendment, had been violated. DeFunis v. Odegaard came before the Court in 1974. However, DeFunis had been admitted to the law school after a lower court found in his favor, and the school had said that he would be allowed to graduate, regardless of the Court’s ruling. The Court ruled the case moot because a ruling would not affect the outcome for the plaintiff, and it dismissed the appeal. Justice William O. Douglas wrote a dissent expressing his view that DeFunis had indeed been denied equal protection under the law. Increasing Challenges Although the Court did not have to rule on preferential treatment of protected categories of people in the DeFunis case, challenges to affirmative action increased through the 1970’s. One of the objections was the claim that affirmative action violated Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which forbids discrimination on the basis of race. Many critics maintained that preferential treatment of minority group members could be viewed as discrimination against those who were not minority group members. In United Steelworkers of America v. Weber (1979), the court ruled that Title VII’s prohibition against racial discrimination does not condemn all private, voluntary race-conscious affirma-

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tive action plans. Kaiser Aluminum and Chemical Corporation and the United Steelworkers Union maintained a training program. As long as the percentage of African Americans among Kaiser’s plant employees was less than the percentage of African Americans in the local workforce, half of the openings in this program were reserved for African Americans. Brian Weber, a white man who had not been allowed to enter the training program, sued, claiming that he had been a victim of racial discrimination. Justice William J. Brennan, Jr., writing for the majority of justices, maintained that Congress had not intended Title VII to prohibit private, voluntary efforts to overcome long-established patterns of racial discrimination in employment. In addition, the Fourteenth Amendment did not apply in this case because it did not involve any governmental actions. Whites, in Brennan’s view, were not handicapped by the policy regarding the training program because no whites were fired and whites still had opportunities for advancement. The Bakke Case The best-known challenge to affirmative action to come before the Court was Regents of the University of California v. Bakke (1978). Allan Bakke was a white man who had been denied admission to the University of California medical school at Davis. In 1972 the thirty-two-year-old Bakke was a Marine Corps veteran who had served in Vietnam and an engineer at a research center of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) near Palo Alto, California. While working at NASA, he decided to become a medical doctor. He took classes to prepare himself for medical school and served as a volunteer in a local hospital emergency room. Despite receiving high scores on the Medical College Admissions Test and having strong letters of recommendation, Bakke was rejected by the University of California and ten other schools to which he applied. He wrote to the chairman of admissions at the University of California, Davis, requesting reconsideration, charging that racial minority members who were less qualified than he had been admitted through a special admissions program. Bakke reapplied for early admissions in 1973 and prepared

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to sue if he was again rejected. In the summer of 1974 Bakke’s suit was officially filed in Yolo County Superior Court. Bakke became one of the most celebrated court cases of the decade. It provoked national debate over affirmative action and brought wide attention to the practice of setting aside places in businesses or educational institutions for minority members. The California supreme court found that Bakke had suffered racial discrimination. In November, 1976, the Board of Regents of the University of California voted to appeal the decision to the Supreme Court. Four justices, led by Justice Brennan, voted not to hear the case. Five chose to hear it, however, and it went on the Court docket. Ultimately, the Court reached a split decision. Four justices concluded that the University of California had clearly violated both the equal protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment and the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Four other justices disagreed and wanted to uphold the constitutionality of taking race into consideration for education or employment. The swing vote, Justice Lewis F. Powell, Jr., essentially divided his decision.

The phasing out of affirmative action programs in several major universities’ admission policies during the mid-1990’s threatened to return American colleges and universities to the racially imbalanced student bodies of earlier eras. (National Archives)

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He sided with the four who maintained that the minority setaside program at Davis was unconstitutional; however, he also stated that although racial quotas were unacceptable, race could be taken into consideration. The majority opinion, written by Brennan, incorporated Powell’s ambivalence. It stated that it was constitutional to take race into account to remedy disadvantages resulting from past prejudice and discrimination, but that race alone could not be the basis for making decisions about opportunities in employment or education. After Bakke Many legal scholars believe that Bakke established an unclear precedent. Although it did uphold the basic principle of affirmative action, it also left the door open for challenges to specific affirmative action policies. As a part of the 1977 Public Works Employment Act, Congress set aside 10 percent of all federal appropriations for public works contracts for minority contractors and subcontractors. This legislation came before the Court in Fullilove v. Klutznick (1980). Once again, a controversial issue split the members of the Court. One of the differences between Fullilove and earlier affirmative action cases was that it involved the actions of Congress, which may act with greater power and authority than a private employer or a local school board and is also charged with seeking the present and future welfare of the nation. Chief Justice Burger’s opinion, joined by Justices Powell and Byron R. White, recognized this, stating that Congress has the power to act to remedy social evils and that there was a compelling governmental interest in seeking to counteract the deep-rooted disadvantages of minority contractors. Thurgood Marshall, joined by Justices Brennan and Harry A. Blackmun, wrote a concurring opinion arguing that the actions of Congress were constitutional because the setaside provision was related to the congressionally approved goal of overcoming racial inequality. Justices Potter Stewart, William H. Rehnquist, and John Paul Stevens disagreed. Stewart and Rehnquist maintained that an unconstitutional practice could not be constitutional simply because it came from Congress rather than from a lesser source and that the set-aside involved distrib-

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uting governmental privileges based on birth. Stevens objected to the governmental favoring of some groups over others and pointed out that those who were likely to benefit most were the least disadvantaged members of minority groups, such as successful black or Hispanic businesspeople. Thus, although Fullilove established once more the principle of affirmative action, it also made it clear that there were fundamental disagreements on the principle, even among the justices. Two major issues emerged from the Fullilove decision. One was the concept that affirmative action policies undertaken by the government merit a special deference because of the constitutional authority of Congress to make laws. The second was that because affirmative action is a means of pursuing governmental policies, agencies and organizations must be able to demonstrate that their affirmative action programs serve a compelling governmental interest. This second point placed the burden of justifying affirmative action programs on those seeking to establish the policies. Those seeking to pursue affirmative action policies must be able to demonstrate that these policies are narrowly designed to compensate for past discrimination or to bring about a clearly defined goal. For this reason, the Court decided in Mississippi University for Women v. Hogan (1982) that a college could not deny men entry into a nursing program on the grounds that this was intended to compensate women for past discrimination. On the other hand, when past discrimination could be clearly demonstrated, affirmative action policies were deemed acceptable. A requirement in Alabama that one black state trooper be promoted for every promotion of a white state trooper was upheld by the Court in United States v. Paradise (1987) because it could be demonstrated that underrepresentation of African Americans at high ranks was caused by past discrimination by the Alabama Department of Public Safety. In Richmond v. J. A. Croson Company (1989), however, the Court ruled that the Richmond city government’s minority business utilization plan failed to provide appropriate statistical data showing systematic underrepresentation of minority-owned businesses. Therefore, the Court found that the plan was not narrowly tailored to remedy the effects of prior discrimination and failed to demonstrate a compelling gov-

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ernment interest for awarding a certain percentage of contracts to minority-owned businesses. Both the concept of the special status of Congress and of the legitimacy of affirmative action for compelling governmental interests were upheld in Metro Broadcasting v. Federal Communications Commission (1990), in which a majority of justices ruled that minority preference policies of the Federal Communications Commission were acceptable because they met both criteria. Limits on Affirmative Action During the 1990’s there were a number of public challenges to affirmative action, notably in the Texas and California systems of higher education, where controversial laws passed in 1997 made it illegal to give preferential treatment to members of protected groups. Affirmative action proponent Marshall left the Court in 1991, and new justices appointed by Presidents Ronald Reagan and George Bush—including Sandra Day O’Connor, Anthony M. Kennedy, Antonin Scalia, and Clarence Thomas—appeared to be largely unsympathetic to affirmative-action-style policies. In his book on affirmative action and the Court, Lincoln Caplan observed that in the middle to late 1990’s Chief Justice Rehnquist and Justices O’Connor, Kennedy, Scalia, and Thomas never voted to uphold an affirmative action program based on race. Thomas, the only African American among these justices, was the strongest and most open opponent of the preferential treatment of members of minorities, which he derided as “racial paternalism.” The limiting of affirmative action appeared in Adarand Constructors v. Peña (1995), in which the Court expanded the idea that programs had to serve a compelling interest. Affirmative action programs, the court ruled, must be observed with the strictest scrutiny and must be necessary to meet a compelling state interest. By the end of the twentieth century, many observers were predicting that the Court would make a ruling that would end affirmative action. This perception made some defenders of affirmative action policies reluctant to bring cases before the Court. This happened, for example, in the case of Sharon Taxman. Taxman, a white teacher, had been laid off from her job by the school district of Piscataway, New Jersey, in 1991. The school district needed to

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reduce its teaching force and had to choose between Taxman and an equally qualified black teacher. Because black teachers were underrepresented in the district, the school system used its voluntary affirmative action program to decide between the two teachers. Taxman sued, claiming racial discrimination. The case was poised to go to the Court in late 1997. Fear that a Court ruling in favor of Taxman would further weaken affirmative action led civil rights groups to support the Piscataway School Board’s decision to pay Taxman a $433,000 settlement in November, 1997, rather than risk an unfavorable Court decision. The Court also showed a reluctance to hear affirmative action cases at the end of the twentieth century. In March, 1999, the Court refused to hear a case regarding a program in Dallas, Texas, that had been intended to benefit minority firefighters. A lower court, the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals, earlier found that there was insufficient evidence of a historical pattern of discrimination against members of minorities in Dallas to justify preferential promotions for minority candidates. The two justices who had been appointed by President Bill Clinton, Stephen G. Breyer and Ruth Bader Ginsburg, issued a written dissent urging the majority of justices to take the case. Nevertheless, the Court let the decision of the lower court stand. Many observers maintained that this case and others like it sent the message that the majority on the Court saw racial preferences as a dying and disfavored strategy. Carl L. Bankston III Further Reading An insightful work on affirmative action is Terry H. Anderson’s The Pursuit of Fairness: A History of Affirmative Action (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004). Brian Pusser’s Burning Down the House: Politics, Governance, and Affirmative Action at the University of California (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2004) and Greg Stohr’s A Black and White Case: How Affirmative Action Survived Its Greatest Legal Challenge (Princeton: Bloomberg Press, 2004) are timely and valuable additions to the literature on affirmative action. Up Against the Law: Affirmative Action and the Supreme Court (New York: Twentieth Century Fund Press, 1997) is a short introduction to the role of the Supreme Court in

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the American debate over affirmative action that also offers explanations of the practices and consequences of affirmative action programs. A great deal has been written on the Bakke case. Timothy J. O’Neill’s “Bakke” and the Politics of Equality: Friends and Foes in the Classroom of Litigation (Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 1981) is a detailed study of the case and of the political forces on both sides. Readers who want to know about the Bakke case should consult Howard Ball’s The Bakke Case: Race, Education, and Affirmative Action (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2000) and Behind “Bakke”: Affirmative Action and the Supreme Court (New York: New York University Press, 1988) by Bernard Schwartz. The Color-Blind Constitution (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1992) attempts to discover the history of the argument that the Constitution prohibits racial classifications by agencies of the government. The last chapter, “Benign Racial Sorting,” is particularly useful to those interested in the arguments surrounding affirmative action issues. For the ideas behind questions of racial preferences, readers may want to consult Equality and Preferential Treatment (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1972). This is a collection of essays by professors of law and philosophy that attempt to present arguments for and against racial, ethnic, or gender preferences in schooling or employment. Although the book is a little old, its arguments continue to be relevant. Dinesh D’Souza’s Illiberal Education: The Politics of Race and Sex on Campus (New York: Free Press, 1991), a work strongly opposed to affirmative action, presents a view of affirmative action policies in universities before these began to be scaled back. The Shape of the River: Long-Term Consequences of Considering Race in College and University Admissions (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1998) by William G. Bowen and Derek C. Bok provides a positive view of affirmative action in higher education. See also Adarand Constructors v. Peña; Bakke case; Civil Rights movement; Civil Rights Restoration Act; Education; Employment; Equal Employment Opportunity Act of 1972; Equal Employment Opportunity Commission; Fullilove v. Klutznick; Griggs v. Duke Power Company; Integration; United Steelworkers of America v. Weber

African Liberation Day

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African Liberation Day The Event: Internationally recognized anniversary commemorating the freeing of Africa from European colonization Date: May 25, 1963 Place: Worldwide African Liberation Day is a date honored throughout the African world, as a day on which to unite and denounce racism, capitalism, and Zionism. In 1963, thirty-one African heads of state convened in Ethiopia for the Summit Conference of the Independent African States, with the overall goal of freeing African people from the yoke of European domination and white supremacy. On May 25, 1963, the Charter of the Organization of African Unity was signed, and it was decided to celebrate African Liberation Day every year on May 25. Sponsored by the All African People’s Revolutionary Party, African Liberation Day has led to the concerted action of the member states of the Organization of African Unity to pool financial aid to revive, strengthen, and intensify liberation movements throughout Africa. As much as possible, the goal is to end exploitation and oppression of Africans at home and abroad by finding peaceful solutions through deliberations and frank exchange of views among the nations that are involved. African Liberation Day has become an institution throughout the African world, being a day when all African people rally for unity and denounce racism, capitalism, and Zionism. On African Liberation Day, African people focus on what they share—their common past, set of problems, and future—as they pause to think about the plight of their African brothers who are under foreign rule and who are seeking to win their freedom and fundamental human rights. Alvin K. Benson See also Black Is Beautiful movement; Black nationalism; Black Power movement; Pan-Africanism

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African Methodist Episcopal Church

African Methodist Episcopal Church Identification: Predominantly African American Protestant denomination Date: Founded on April 9, 1816 The African Methodist Episcopal Church was a radically distinct denomination that became an advocate for the cause of abolition and a bulwark of the African American community. On April 9, 1816, sixteen African Methodist delegates met in Philadelphia to unite as the African Methodist Episcopal Church. Delegates from Philadelphia and Attleborough, Pennsylvania, joined representatives from Baltimore, Wilmington, and Salem to elect a bishop. They elected Richard Allen, who was consecrated as the first bishop of the African Methodist Episcopal Church (AME Church) on April 11, 1816. From the original sixteen delegates in 1816, membership grew to 7,257 by 1822. Allen, known as the father of African American religion, was born a slave in 1760 in Philadelphia. Sold to the Stokeley plantation near Dover, Delaware, Allen attended evangelical tent meetings and experienced a religious conversion when he was seventeen years of age. He joined the Methodist Society, which held classes in the forest under the leadership of a white man, Benjamin Wells. Allen became a convincing proselytizer, converting first his family and then his owner, who agreed to Allen’s proposal to purchase his own freedom in 1777. Allen worked at many jobs and preached at his regular stops, developing broad contacts through his travels. As an aide to other itinerant preachers, he met Bishop Francis Asbury, who established the first General Conference of the Methodist Church in America in 1784. Allen declined to accompany Asbury on a trip through the South and returned to Philadelphia in February, 1786. Allen joined such Philadelphia leaders as former slave clerk and handyman Absalom Jones and other members of the St. Thomas vestry: James Forten, William White, Jacob Tapisco, and James Champion. Allen and Jones became lay preachers throughout the city, including early-morning and evening services at St. George’s Methodist Episcopal Church. As African American at-

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tendance increased, racial conflict became apparent. In November, 1787, African Americans worshiping at St. George’s were ordered to the gallery. After mistaking the section of the gallery assigned for their worship, Allen, Jones, and White were physically removed while praying at the Sunday morning worship service. The Free African Society The humiliation of this incident led to a mass exodus of African Americans from this church and a movement to create a separate church. In the spring, these African American leaders established the Free African Society, the first mutual aid society established to serve their community. By 1791, they held regular Sunday services, assumed lay leadership positions, and made plans for construction of a church building. The leaders differed over the issue of church affiliation, with the majority voting to unite with the Episcopal church. On July 17, 1794, the St. Thomas African Church was dedicated as the first African church in Philadelphia, a Protestant Episcopal church with Jones as pastor. Jones became the first African American priest in 1804.

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Allen withdrew from the Free African Society to form a separate church, the Bethel African Methodist Episcopal Church, on July 29, 1794. Allen declared the church independent in management but did not sever all relations with the Methodist Episcopal Church. The articles of incorporation ensured independence by allowing membership only to African Americans. Allen became the first African American to receive ordination from the Methodist Episcopal Church in the United States. A Force for Change Such church independence helped African Americans resist the insults and subordination resulting from slavery and racial prejudice and reflected a growing role of the church in the community. Sermons underscored the need for the African American community to become self-reliant through the church, schools, and economic organizations in order to gain group solidarity and recognition. Christian character, in turn, depended upon Christian education. In 1804, Allen established the Society of Free People of Color for Promoting the Instruction and School Education of Children of African Descent. In 1809, he helped Forten and Jones organize the Society for the Suppression of Vice and Immorality in Philadelphia, to provide community supervision of the morality of African Americans and to establish means for their moral uplift. These leaders recruited three thousand members for the Black Legion during the War of 1812. The successful functions associated with African American churches led to greater membership. By 1813, St. Thomas had a membership of 560, while Bethel Church had 1,272 communicants. The movement spread to other cities and along the seaboard states. Church leaders continued their pioneering efforts for group solidarity. In January, 1817, the First Negro Convention met at the Bethel Church to protest the plans of the American Colonization Society for emigration of free blacks to Africa. Also in 1817, Allen and Tapisco published the First Church Discipline as well as a book of hymns compiled by Allen, Daniel Coker, and Champion. The church continued to improve the conditions for African Americans. It supported the use of boycotts to protest the eco-

African Methodist Episcopal Church /

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nomic basis of slavery through the Free Produce Society of Philadelphia, which was organized at an assembly at Bethel Church on December 20, 1830, to advocate purchase of produce grown only by free labor. The First Annual Convention of the People of Color, convened in Philadelphia in 1831, elected Allen as its leader shortly before his death on March 26, 1831. The African Methodist Episcopal Church has survived as an integral part of the African American community and continued its strong leadership role. Dorothy C. Salem Further Reading Jualynne E. Dodson’s Engendering Church: Women, Power, and the AME Church (Lanham, Md.: Rowman & Littlefield, 2002) is a helpful analysis on women and the AME Church. Social Protest Thought in the African Methodist Episcopal Church, 1862-1939 (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 2000) edited by Stephen W. Angell and Anthony B. Pinn and Disciples of Liberty: The African Methodist Episcopal Church in the Age of Imperialism, 18841916 (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 2000) by Lawrence S. Little are serviceable additions to the literature on the AME Church. James T. Campbell’s Songs of Zion: The African Methodist Episcopal Church in the United States and South Africa (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995) examines the rise and development of the AME Church in America and South Africa. Katharine L. Dvorak’s An African American Exodus (Brooklyn, N.Y.: Carlson, 1991) provides the history and theology of the nineteenth century African Methodist Episcopal Church. A number of books and articles describe Richard Allen and his life and work, including Allen’s own The Life, Experience, and Gospel Labors of the Right Reverent Richard Allen, originally published in 1833 (Nashville, Tenn.: Abingdon Press, 1983), Carol V. R. George’s Segregated Sabbaths: Richard Allen and the Rise of Independent Black Churches, 1760-1840 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1973), Richard Allen: The First Exemplar of African American Education (New York: ECA Associates, 1985) by Mwalimu I. Mwadilitu (E. Curtis Alexander), Charles Wesley’s Richard Allen: Apostle of Freedom (Washington, D.C.: Associated Publishers, 1935), and

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African Methodist Episcopal Zion Churches

Gary Nash’s “New Light on Richard Allen: The Early Years of Freedom” in William and Mary Quarterly 46 (April, 1989). See also African Methodist Episcopal Zion Churches; Baptist Church; Black church; Free African Society

African Methodist Episcopal Zion Churches Identification: Predominantly African American Protestant denomination Date: Founded in 1821 The church has historically emphasized advancement of black citizenship rights, expanded roles for women in church government, and ecumenicism among black and white Methodist churches. The African Methodist Episcopal (AME) Zion Church is one of several black Methodist churches that originated in the northern United States in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Organized in 1821, the AME Zion Church was conceived in the 1790’s, when a handful of black congregations broke away from the predominantly white Methodist Episcopal denomination in search of greater autonomy and freedom of worship. These independent black Methodist churches eventually organized into three separate denominations: the Union Church of Africans; the African Methodist Episcopal (AME) Church; and the New York City-based AME Zion Church. Although largely similar in doctrine, these and other black Methodist churches operated separately, occasionally clashing over competition for membership and the question of which denomination was established first. The AME Zion Church grew steadily before the Civil War, establishing congregations as far south as Louisville, Kentucky, and rousing white suspicion for its emphasis on abolitionism and religious self-determination. Emancipation and Reconstruction opened the postbellum South to black Methodist churches,

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sparking a dramatic expansion of AME Zion missionary activity in North America, the Caribbean, and Africa that increased AME Zion Church membership from 4,600 in 1860 to around 350,000 in 1896. In addition to missionary activity, the AME Zion Church has historically emphasized advancement of black citizenship rights, expanded roles for women in church government, and ecumenicism among black and white Methodist churches. Michael H. Burchett See also African Methodist Episcopal Church; Baptist Church; Black church

Afrocentrism Definition: Philosophy of historical analysis and education articulated by Molefi Kete Asante Afrocentrism offers an alternative to “Eurocentric” interpretations of history. A professor of African American studies at Temple University, Molefi Kete Asante is the author of The Afrocentricity Idea (1987), Afrocentricity (1988), and Kemet, Afrocentricity, and Knowledge (1990), and other works that define Afrocentrism as the perspective of history that allows students to observe the world from the point of view of the African and African American. Asante created Afrocentrism as a reaction to “Eurocentric” interpretations of history, which, in Asante’s view, marginalize members of ethnic and racial minorities by portraying them as victims and passive participants in European-dominated history. Asante’s philosophy advocates a “multi-centered multiculturalism” in which all racial groups are encouraged to write history from their perspective to replace the “monocentric,” or European-dominated, historical perspective. Asante’s philosophy does not advocate the elimination of the European perspective but rather invites the European perspective to be presented alongside the interpretations of other racial groups. Opponents

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of the Afrocentric model, however, accuse Asante and his supporters of historical inaccuracy and of using history to promote a racist political agenda. The philosophy of Afrocentrism borrows heavily from the writings of Carter G. Woodson, Asa Hilliard, and Cheikh Anta Diop. Jason Pasch See also Black Is Beautiful movement; Black nationalism; Education

Agriculture Through most of American history, agriculture was the primary occupation of African Americans. It was only after World War II that African Americans joined the general shift of laborers away from agriculture. African Americans have deep historical ties to agriculture. During the centuries of slavery, tending crops was the primary economic activity of enslaved African Americans. Along the South Atlantic Coast in colonial North America and in the young United States, tobacco depended heavily on slave labor. Later, rice, grown in parts of South Carolina and other states, and sugar cane, grown chiefly in Louisiana, became important cash crops grown by slaves. With the development of the cotton gin at the end of the eighteenth century, cotton became the most profitable agricultural export of the United States. After the Civil War and emancipation, African Americans remained heavily involved in agriculture, particularly in the South. In the second half of the twentieth century, however, African American involvement in farmwork dropped dramatically, so that only a tiny proportion of African Americans were involved in agricultural labor as the twenty-first century began. While nearly two-thirds of African American workers were engaged in agricultural labor in 1870, only about 1 percent worked in agriculture in 2000.

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Black Farmers After Slavery After slavery ended in 1865, most African Americans still lived in the rural South, where farming remained the most important occupation. In order to farm, however, workers needed land, tools, farm animals, and seeds and other supplies. As a result, most African Americans farmed on white-owned land through tenant, sharecropper, and crop-lien systems. Tenant farmers rented their plots of land for fixed sums—in money or the equivalent in crops. Under the sharecropping system, the farmers borrowed fertilizer, tools, seeds, and other necessities from landowners. They then paid off their debts, with interest, by giving the landowners shares of their crops. Since the landowners often charged high rates of interest and were also the primary keepers of business records, sharecroppers frequently fell steadily deeper into debt with each harvest. The crop-lien system gave merchants and landlords who provided supplies to farmers mortgages on the crops that the farmers promised to produce. Again, high interest rates gave the advantage to the lenders and contributed to keeping most black farmers in perpetual debt and poverty. At the same time, concentration on the planting of cotton, encouraged by white landowners, further hampered black farmers in the South. Overproduction of cotton led to a drastic drop in cotton prices during the second half of the nineteenth century. Some scholars have estimated that by 1890, nine out of ten African American farmers were sharecroppers. Despite the many handicaps that African Americans face and widespread white southern opposition to their owning land, a substantial minority of African Americans did manage to acquire their own land in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In 1886, African American farmers joined together to form a mutual-support organization, the Colored Farmers’ Alliance, modeled on the white Farmers’ Alliance founded two years earlier. This cooperative endeavor supported its members and aided in the progress of independent African American farms. Meanwhile, the founding of black-owned banks and other financial institutions helped in their efforts. About fifty black-owned lending institutions were founded between 1880 and 1911. By

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Contemporary drawings of slaves working a rice plantation in North Carolina. (Library of Congress)

1910, around 200,000 African American families had managed to obtain their own farmland. Their holdings totaled something over fifteen million acres—an average of about 75 acres per family. The Great Migration North During World War I and the years immediately following it, African Americans continued to be concentrated regionally in the South and occupationally in agriculture. Two trends began to undermine these concentrations. First, U.S. entry into the war in 1916 created thousands of new jobs in northern cities, and northern black leaders urged the oppressed populations of the rural South to move north. Second, cotton prices fell again, depressing the southern economy. Although black farmers were still more heavily involved in cotton growing than white farmers, government farm aid went primarily to the white farmers. The new black-owned lending institutions that had helped promote African American land ownership were hit hard, were unable to collect on their loans, and many went bankrupt. The troubles of

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black farmers were compounded by the spread of the boll weevil, an insect that destroyed cotton crops. These new problems forced many black landowners to consider returning to sharecropping or working for white farmers as laborers at deplorable wages. Between 1910 and 1920, about 300,000 African Americans left the predominantly rural South, mostly for northern cities, in a movement that became known as the Great Migration. During the 1920’s, the exodus grew greater, as an estimated 1,500,000 African Americans left the South between 1920 and 1930. The Depression The 1930’s were hard years for many Americans but were even harder on African Americans—especially African Americans who worked in agriculture or had commercial ties to it. Black-owned banks, dependent on loans to African American farmers, had already started failing before the Depression. Of the fifty black-owned lending institutions in existence in 1911, only about twenty-five survived to 1930. Three years later, when President Franklin D. Roosevelt tried to stop investors from withdrawing all the money from banks by closing banks for three days, only eleven black-owned banks remained in the entire United States. As northern jobs dried up during the Depression, the movement of African Americans to northern cities slowed. Surplus agricultural labor became plentiful in the South, and agricultural wages dropped. Black tenant farmers found it increasingly difficult to come up with rent for land and the sharecropping system took on renewed life. According to the U.S. Farm Security Administration, by the end of the 1930’s, 47 percent of all African Americans in farming were sharecroppers, 32 percent were tenant farmers, and only 21 percent were landowners. In 1931, African American farmers, supported and encouraged by the Communist Party, joined together to found the Sharecroppers Union in Alabama. The union spread to other states and may have had as many as twelve thousand members by 1935. However, the union’s connection with the Communist Party hindered its growth, as many black farmers

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were reluctant to become involved with an organization that had communist sponsorship. Some government programs made the problems of African American farmers worse. For example, the federal Agricultural Adjustment Act (AAA), passed in 1933, paid farmers to cut back on their production of crops in order to stabilize crop prices. With an incentive to produce less, landowners frequently fired their farmworkers and evicted tenant farmers—workers who were predominantly black. Some funds paid by the Department of Agriculture were intended to go to workers or tenants, but the money went directly to landowners, who typically passed on little or none of it. In response, black and white tenant farmers in Arkansas formed the Southern Tenant Farmers Union in 1934. This organization spread to six other states and acquired an estimated 30,000 members. With little support from the federal government, however, the union gradually faded. The Decline of African American Agriculture With the entry of the United States into World War II at the end of 1941, the African American movement to northern cities that had slowed during the Depression began once again. In the years that followed the war, African American movement out of rural areas and out of agriculture grew rapidly. In 1940, slightly fewer than one in three African American workers were in jobs in agriculture; this proportion dropped to less than one in four by 1950. By 1960, fewer than one in ten African Americans were in agriculture. The decrease continued steadily, so that by the year 2000, only slightly more than one in one hundred African Americans were in agriculture. Meanwhile, the small farms owned by African Americans had become outdated, as large-scale agribusiness took over farming throughout the United States. Demand for farmworkers declined steadily over the second half of the twentieth century. By the 1960’s, the sharecropper system had virtually disappeared in most of the South, where mechanization had reduced the need for human labor. In 1967, the federal government included agricultural workers under its minimum wage law. As a result, farmworkers immedi-

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Percentages of African American and White Workers Employed in Agriculture, 1870-2000 African Year American White 1870

64.3

43.1

1880

59.8

38.6

1900

53.7

33.9

1910

47.6

27.9

1920

41.3

22.2

1940

31.2

15.5

1950

23.4

13.3

1960

9.1

6.5

1970

3.5

3.4

1980

1.6

2.9

1990

1.3

3.0

2000

1.2

2.8

ately became much more expensive for southern planters, who became even more reliant on machines and began controlling weeds with chemicals, instead of workers with hoes. After centuries of heavy African American concentration in agriculture, black agricultural workers had almost disappeared. A decline in the numbers of black farmworkers was not the only change. The remaining farmworkers were growing much older. Few young African Americans were going into agricultural work by the end of the twentieth century. During the 1990’s, the median age for black farmers was sixty years, one in every four was over seventy years old. These aging farmers held only a small percentage of America’s farm land. Of the 960 million acres of agricultural land in the United States at the end of the twentieth century, only about 2.6 million acres—0.25 percent—were owned by African Americans.

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Suing the Federal Government Many African American farmers have argued that a long history of government discrimination against them has continued. In 1997, organizations representing them filed a class action lawsuit against the federal Department of Agriculture. The farmers maintained that the department had discriminated against them by denying them loans and other forms of aid. This discrimination, according to the farmers, contributed to the decline of African American agriculture. In April, 1999, federal district court Judge Paul L. Friedman approved a settlement agreement on the case. African American farmers could file for compensation along two tracks. On the first track, they could file claims of past discrimination and receive automatic payments of fifty thousand dollars upon approval of their claims. The second track made possible greater compensation for farmers, but only after they went through hearings. The deadline for submitting claims was in September, 2000. These settlements did not end legal action and did not end complaints about discrimination by the Department of Agriculture. Some farmers objected that the department had not sufficiently publicized the availability of compensation before the deadline passed. Others said that the department was slow in awarding compensation money and resisted paying out the money at every opportunity. By July, 2002, the Department of Agriculture had awarded about $645 million in payments and forgiven loans. However, this was only a small portion of the amount that should have been paid, according to some observers. A report issued in the summer of 2004 by the Washington-based Environmental Working Group maintained that the Department of Agriculture had assigned Justice Department lawyers to fight claims. Among the 94,000 farmers who filed for compensation, according to the report, 81,000, or nearly 90 percent, were denied their claims. Carl L. Bankston III Further Reading Banks, Vera J. Rural Research Development Report No. 59: Black Farmers and Their Farms. Washington, D.C.: U.S. Department of

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Agriculture, 1986. U.S. government report on black farming in the United States. Daniel, Pete. The Shadow of Slavery: Peonage in the South, 1901-1969. New York: Oxford University Press, 1972. Classic and widely cited work on rural race relations during the years when sharecropping was the major concentration of African Americans in agriculture. Gilbert, Charlene, and Quinn Eli. Homecoming: The Story of African American Farmers. Boston: Beacon Press, 2000. A companion volume to Charlene Gilbert’s film Homecoming, this book provides a compelling introduction to the history of African American farmers and contains an excellent selection of historic photographs. Nieman, Donald G. From Slavery to Sharecropping: White Land and Black Labor in the Rural South, 1865-1900. New York: Garland, 1994. Thorough coverage of the history of black farmworkers during the transition from slavery to sharecropping. Tolnay, Stewart E. The Bottom Rung: African American Family Life on Southern Farms. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1999. Provides an intimate look at how African American farmers lived. See also Demographic trends; Economic trends; Employment; Great Migration; Sharecropping; Slavery

Albemarle Paper Company v. Moody The Case: U.S. Supreme Court ruling on employment discrimination Date: June 25, 1975 Referring back to Title VII of the Civil Rights Law of 1964, the Supreme Court found that an employer’s screening tests were discriminatory and that the employer must provide back pay for employees who suffered monetary loss as a result of racial discrimination. African American employees in a North Carolina paper mill, the Albemarle Paper Company, charged that the company’s preem-

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ployment tests and seniority system perpetuated the discrimination that had existed before the passage of Title VII, and they sought back pay relief. By a 7-1 vote, the Supreme Court ruled in favor of the employees. Because the tests were judged to be not sufficiently job related to be valid, they had to be discontinued. The awarding of back pay, moreover, provided an appropriate incentive for compliance with the law. The Albemarle Paper Company decision provided a useful framework for resolving numerous claims under Title VII. Thomas Tandy Lewis See also Civil Rights Act of 1964; Griggs v. Duke Power Company

Alexander v. Holmes County Board of Education The Case: U.S. Supreme Court ruling on school desegregation Date: October 29, 1969 In this case, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that southern school boards must desegregate their schools immediately and refused to grant several school districts a one-semester delay in proceeding with school desegregation. In the late 1960’s, many southern school districts still operated segregated schools, notwithstanding pressure from both the U.S. Office of Education and the federal courts to integrate. In the late 1960’s, African American parents throughout Mississippi, with the assistance of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) Legal Defense and Educational Fund, filed lawsuits challenging segregation in thirty Mississippi school districts. In 1969, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit ordered the districts to file desegregation plans by August 11, 1969, to take effect by the beginning of the 1969-1970 school year. With the support of President Richard M. Nixon’s Department of Justice, however, the school districts requested the

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court to allow them to postpone the submission of school desegregation plans until December 1, 1969. The proceedings, which marked the first time that the Department of Justice had asked for a delay in a school desegregation case, reflected the Nixon administration’s lukewarm support for school desegregation. The Fifth Circuit granted the request, and the parents who had filed the original suits appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court. The Supreme Court considered the case in an expedited fashion. On October 29, 1969—only twenty days after deciding to hear the case, and only six days after oral argument—the Court held that the court of appeals had erred in permitting the delay; the Court’s decision stated that “the obligation of every school district is to terminate dual school systems at once.” The Court ordered every affected school district to “begin immediately to operate as unitary school systems.” The Alexander decision signaled an unprecedented sense of urgency in school desegregation cases. After allowing local school boards to desegregate at a slow pace for much of the prior fifteen years, the Court had now indicated that further delays would not be tolerated—even delays until the end of a school semester or school year. In a sense, the Alexander decision constituted the Court’s atonement for the “all deliberate speed” language of its 1954 decision in Brown v. Board of Education; although the Brown decision had been a landmark in the battle against segregation, the muted language of the Court’s opinion had allowed another generation of African American children to remain in segregated schools. Beginning with its Green v. County School Board of New Kent County decision (1968), the Court had finally begun to insist upon meaningful desegregation. Faced for the first time with Justice Department recalcitrance in a desegregation case and a presidential administration with a questionable commitment to school integration, the Court acted in dramatic fashion to signal that the time for delay and “deliberate speed” had come to an end. In the wake of the Alexander decision, courts throughout the South began to insist on immediate desegregation, in some instances in the middle of the school year. The Alexander decision

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dramatically altered the time frame within which school boards were required to meet their desegregation obligations. See also Brown v. Board of Education; Green v. County School Board of New Kent County; Segregation

American Anti-Slavery Society Identification: Northern abolitionist organization Date: Founded in December, 1833 Place: Philadelphia, Pennsylvania This organization unified two centers of radical abolitionism and called for immediate eradication of slavery. In December, 1833, sixty delegates gathered in Philadelphia to form the American Anti-Slavery Society, electing Arthur Tappan, a wealthy New York businessman, as president. They also approved a Declaration of Sentiments, drawn up by William Lloyd Garrison, Samuel May, and John Greenleaf Whittier, that called for immediate, uncompensated, total abolition of slavery through moral and political action. In signing the declaration, the delegates pledged to “do all that in us lies, consisting with this declaration of our principles, to overthrow the most execrable system of slavery that has ever been witnessed upon earth . . . and to secure to the colored population of the United States, all the rights and privileges which belong to them as men and Americans.” The American Anti-Slavery Society organized a system of state and local auxiliaries, sent out agents to convert people to its views, and published pamphlets and journals supporting its position. The society grew rapidly; by 1838, it reported approximately 250,000 members and 1,350 auxiliaries. Immediatism Before the 1830’s, most opponents of slavery advocated moderate methods such as gradual and “compensated” emancipation, which would reimburse former slave owners who released slaves, or removal of free African Americans to Liberia by the

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American Colonization Society, founded in 1817. The formation of a national organization based on the principle of immediatism, or immediate and total emancipation, symbolized the new phase that antislavery agitation had entered in the early 1830’s— radical, uncompromising, and intensely moralistic. The shift to immediatism was a result of several factors, including the failure of moderate methods; the example of the British, who abolished slavery in the empire in 1833; and, probably most important, evangelical religion. Abolitionists of the 1830’s inherited from earlier antislavery reformers the notion that slavery was a sin. This notion, coupled with the contemporaneous evangelical doctrine of immediate repentance, shaped the abolitionist doctrine of immediate emancipation. Abolitionists emphasized moral suasion over political methods. They hoped to persuade people to emancipate the slaves voluntarily and to form a conviction of guilt as participants in the national sin of slavery. The American Anti-Slavery Society represented the union of two centers of radical abolitionism, one in Boston, the other around Cincinnati. Garrison, the key figure among New England

The Slave’s Friend, a publication of the American Anti-Slavery Society from 1836. (Library of Congress)

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abolitionists, began publishing The Liberator in 1831 and soon organized the New England Anti-Slavery Society, based on the principle of immediate abolition. In the Midwest, Western Reserve College and Lane Seminary were seedbeds for the doctrine of immediate emancipation. Theodore Dwight Weld, a young man who had been converted to evangelical Christianity by Charles Finney, organized a group of antislavery agents known as The Seventy, who preached the gospel of immediatism throughout the Midwest. Although the leadership of the antislavery movement remained predominantly white, free African Americans played a significant role in its ranks. Before 1800, the Free African Society of Philadelphia and black spokespersons such as astronomer Benjamin Banneker and church leader Richard Allen had denounced slavery in the harshest terms. By 1830, there were fifty antislavery societies organized by African Americans, and African Americans contributed to the formation of the American Anti-Slavery Society in 1833. African American orators, especially escaped slaves such as Frederick Douglass and Sojourner Truth, moved large audiences with their impassioned and electrifying oratory. African Americans also helped run the Underground Railroad; Harriet Tubman led more than three hundred African Americans to freedom. Generally, African American abolitionists shared the nonviolent philosophy of the Garrisonians, but black anger often flared because of the racism they found within the antislavery ranks. Influenced by tactical and race considerations, white abolitionist leaders such as Garrison and Weld limited their African American counterparts to peripheral roles or excluded them from local organizations. Internal Divisions The late 1830’s marked the high point of the movement for immediate abolition through moral suasion. Abolitionism was hard hit by the Panic of 1837, a nationwide banking crisis which reduced funds and distracted attention away from reform. At the same time, abolitionists faced an internal challenge as the American Anti-Slavery Society divided into radicals and moderates. One issue causing the split was women’s rights. Moderate aboli-

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tionists tolerated and even welcomed women in the society, as long as their activities were confined to forming auxiliary societies, raising money, and circulating petitions. They refused, however, the request that women be allowed to speak in public on behalf of abolitionism or to help shape the organization’s policies. The other issue that divided abolitionist ranks was that of political action. Some abolitionists, convinced that political action, not merely moral suasion, was necessary to effect emancipation, formed the Liberty Party in 1840. In the 1840’s and 1850’s, the majority of abolitionists moved gradually into the political arena, where they became involved in the Free-Soil movement and other aspects of the sectional conflict leading to the Civil War. Anne C. Loveland Updated by Sudipta Das Further Reading Kevin C. Julius’s The Abolitionist Decade, 1829-1838: A Year-byYear History of Early Events in the Antislavery Movement (Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland & Co., 2004) is a valuable addition to the literature on antislavery societies. Stanley Harrold’s Subversives: Antislavery Community in Washington, D.C., 1828-1865 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2003) is an insightful examination of an antislavery community. Louis Filler’s The Crusade Against Slavery, 1830-1860 (New York: Harper & Row, 1960) is a comprehensive treatment of the people and groups who made up the antislavery movement and the relation of the movement to other reform activities of the period. Lawrence J. Friedman’s Gregarious Saints: Self and Community in American Abolitionism, 18301870 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1982) presents a fresh, challenging analysis of the antislavery movement, written from a psychological perspective and focusing on the firstgeneration immediatists. Antislavery Reconsidered: New Perspectives on the Abolitionists (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1979) edited by Lewis Perry and Michael Fellman contains fourteen original, thought-provoking essays based on a variety of interpretive and methodological approaches. Richard H. Abbott’s Cotton and Capital: Boston Businessmen and Antislavery Reform, 1854-1868 (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1991) ex-

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American Colonization Society

amines the activities and ideology of a group of Bostonian businessmen who fostered abolition. In The Liberator: William Lloyd Garrison (Boston: Little, Brown, 1963), John L. Thomas surveys not only the antislavery movement but also the many other reforms in which the well-known editor was engaged. See also Abolition; American Colonization Society; Free African Society; Liberator, The; National Council of Colored People; Underground Railroad

American Colonization Society Identification: Organization dedicated to repatriating African Americans to Africa Date: Founded in 1816 Place: Philadelphia, Pennsylvania The society’s work had little impact on North American slavery, but the slaves it helped send to West Africa founded the modern nation of Liberia. Organized in 1816, the American Society for Colonizing the Free People of Color of the United States, commonly known as the American Colonization Society, attempted to resolve conflicts over slavery and racism by removing African Americans from the United States. Popular in many northern cities and in the upper South, it counted among its members national figures such as Henry Clay, Daniel Webster, and Francis Scott Key. The society planned to establish a colony in Africa to which free African Americans could voluntarily migrate. Although the society did not address the issue of emancipating enslaved African Americans, it hoped that the colonization scheme would prompt slaveowners to free their slaves, secure in the knowledge that the free blacks would not remain in the South. In 1822, the society helped to found Liberia, on the western coast of Africa, and supported a small settlement there. However, lack of financial support and the commitment to slavery in the lower South doomed the unrealistic plan to failure. Most important, almost all African Ameri-

Amistad slave revolt

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American Colonization Society membership certificate from around 1840. (Library of Congress)

cans rejected the notion of colonization, declaring the United States to be their rightful home. Only fifteen thousand made the journey to Liberia in the years before the Civil War (1861-1865). Thomas Clarkin See also Abolition; American Anti-Slavery Society; Pan-Africanism

Amistad slave revolt The Event: Capture of a Spanish slave ship by its human cargo Date: 1839 Place: North Atlantic Ocean The incident allowed abolitionists to win a victory in the judicial battle that followed an illegal importation of Africans as slaves. Although the British-Spanish Treaty of 1817 banned African slave trading as of 1820, a highly lucrative covert slave trade existed, especially between Africa and Cuba. In April, 1839, a Portuguese

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slave ship left West Africa bound for Havana filled with more than five hundred illegally purchased Africans, mostly Mendis. After a two-month passage in which one-third of the Africans died, the ship reached Havana. Government officials receiving kickbacks provided paperwork declaring these Africans to be ladinos, slaves residing in Cuba prior to 1820, which would make their sale legal. Within a few days, José Ruiz purchased forty-nine adult African men, and Pedro Montes bought four children, three girls and a boy. The Uprising The slaves were loaded onto the schooner Amistad, which set sail for Puerto Príncipe, a few days’ journey away. The Africans, unable to communicate with the Spanish-speaking owners or crew, became convinced that they were to be eaten. On the third night out, Joseph Cinqué picked the lock on his iron collar and broke into the cargo hold, where he and others found cane knives. The Africans took over the ship, killing the captain and the cook. The two crew members disappeared, perhaps having jumped overboard. Ruiz, Montes, and Antonio, the captain’s slave cabin boy, were spared. The Africans demanded to be taken to Sierra Leone. For almost two months, Ruiz and Montes pretended to comply. During the day they sailed southeast, occasionally landing to scavenge for food and water, but at night they headed north and northeast, in the hope of finding help. The schooner’s decrepit condition

Contemporary illustration of the revolt aboard the Amistad in 1839. (Library of Congress)

Amistad slave revolt

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and the many blacks on board aroused suspicion. The Amistad came to the attention of the USS Washington, whose captain, Thomas Gedney, ordered the schooner boarded. The thirty-nine surviving slaves, by now almost starved and unable to resist, were taken into custody. The Legal Battle Ruiz and Montes filed suits to have their slave property returned to them; Gedney claimed salvage rights to the Amistad and its cargo, including the slaves; the Spanish government demanded the fugitives be handed over to it; U.S. abolitionists clamored for the Africans to be set free. Although African slave trade was banned, slavery in Cuba was legal, and Ruiz and Montes had paperwork documenting their ownership. Moreover, there were U.S.-Spanish relations to be considered in determining whether or not the United States should recognize Spanish property rights to the Africans. Precedents from an earlier slaver incident, the Antelope case, had to be analyzed also. Perhaps most important, the Amistad affair carried grave implications for the slavery issue in the United States—and President Martin Van Buren hoped to avoid that issue in his upcoming reelection campaign, knowing that his success depended on maintaining his coalition of northern and southern supporters. Newspapers across the land kept an interested public informed of the status of the case. For the most part, northerners were sympathetic toward the Africans, while southerners felt they should be returned to the Spanish government to be tried for piracy and murder. The affair probably would have been handled quietly and quickly if the abolitionists had not recognized its potential to raise the public’s awareness of the moral and legal issues at stake in the slavery question. Abolitionists and other opponents of slavery quickly formed the Amistad Committee, made up of Simeon Jocelyn, Joshua Leavitt, and Lewis Tappan, to raise money for legal counsel and to appeal to President Van Buren to allow the case to be decided by the United States court system rather than turning the prisoners over to the Spanish government. The committee employed James Covey, a native African who could speak the Mendi lan-

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guage, to communicate with the Amistad blacks, for so far depositions had been given only by the Spaniards and the cabin boy. The legal proceedings began in mid-September, 1839, in the United States circuit court convened in Hartford, Connecticut. The case worked its way over the next eighteen months from circuit court to district court, back to the circuit court and finally to the Supreme Court. The abolitionists made sure that the case stayed before the public. The public, although ambivalent in its responses to the legal and moral questions, stayed interested. The case also excited international interest, and the cause of the abolitionists was substantially aided when Richard Robert Madden, a British official living in Havana, gave a moving and informed deposition concerning the state of the slave trade in Cuba. He spelled out the means and extent of illegal activities and clarified the status of ladinos. He also stated that the children on board the Amistad were without doubt too young to be pre1820 Cuban residents, and that he strongly believed that all the Amistad captives were bozales, newly imported Africans, not ladinos. The Conclusion In January, 1840, Judge Andrew T. Judson of the U.S. District Court of Connecticut ruled that the Africans could not be counted as property in the calculation of salvage value, nor could they legally be held as slaves, because their initial purchase had been illegal. The government appealed the case, and a few months later, Judge Smith Thompson of the U.S. circuit court concurred in Judson’s decision. The government again appealed, and the case came before the U.S. Supreme Court in early 1841. John Quincy Adams argued passionately on behalf of the defendants. On March 9, 1841, the Supreme Court also ruled that Africans brought to Cuba illegally were not property, that as illegally held free men they had a right to mutiny, and that they should therefore be released. In November, 1841, the Africans sailed to Sierra Leone, accompanied by a small group of New England missionaries. The Amistad decision was a great victory for abolitionists and raised the public’s awareness of the slavery issue. The case fed se-

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cessionist sentiments in the southern states but helped opponents of slavery focus on legal attacks against the institution. Grace McEntee Further Reading Iyunolu Folayan Osagie’s The Amistad Revolt: Memory, Slavery, and the Politics of Identity in the United States and Sierra Leone (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2000), Christopher Martin’s The “Amistad” Affair (New York: Abelard-Schuman, 1970), and Howard Jones’s Mutiny on the “Amistad”: The Saga of a Slave Revolt and Its Impact on American Abolition, Law, and Diplomacy (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987) describe the case and its effects. William A. Owens’s Black Mutiny: The Revolt on the Schooner “Amistad” (Philadelphia: Pilgrim Press, 1968) is a dramatized but well-researched rendering of the incident that includes information on the fate of the Africans after the trial. The “Amistad” Case: The Most Celebrated Slave Mutiny of the Nineteenth Century (New York: Johnson Reprint, 1968) contains correspondence between the U.S. and Spanish governments concerning the Amistad case. See also Abolition; Clotilde capture; Slavery; Stono Rebellion; Turner’s slave insurrection

Anderson’s Lincoln Memorial concert The Event: Recital by contralto Marian Anderson on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial Date: April 9, 1939 Place: Washington, D.C. The Daughters of the American Revolution (DAR) rejected contralto Marian Anderson for a singing engagement at Constitution Hall, but Anderson rescheduled her appearance outside the Lincoln Memorial. Even with her rich, warm, evocative contralto, Marian Anderson, the first African American to perform with New York’s Metropolitan Opera Company, did not arrive easily at fame and accep-

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tance, particularly among prejudiced whites. The daughter of a poor Philadelphia widow, she got what training she could afford, then evolved an expanded vocal repertoire including material ranging from spirituals to folk songs and grand opera. She developed a significant following among classical music fans. In 1939, after requesting the use of Washington’s Constitution Hall from the Daughters of the American Revolution, she was humiliated by a flat rejection. A Promising Career Marian, the first of three daughters of John and Annie Anderson, was born at her grandmother’s house in South Philadelphia on February 17, 1902. Her father, a coal and ice seller, died of brain cancer ten years later, leaving his wife, a schoolteacher, to support the family by taking in laundry and working in Wanamaker’s Department Store. Anderson, who progressed from the Union Baptist Church junior choir to public performances of duets and solos, also learned to play the piano and violin. She concentrated on a business curriculum at William Penn High School, then transferred to South Philadelphia High for music training and studied privately under voice coach Mary Patterson. Public response to Anderson’s extensive range and expressive talents brought invitations to a variety of public musical forums and Negro colleges as well as membership in the Philadelphia Choral Society. White philanthropists often donated funds to assist her obviously promising future in music. Despite the beneficence of a few, laws of segregation and local custom required her to travel on separate train cars, ride service elevators, and eat in substandard dining areas maintained for nonwhite patrons. Overnight accommodations in hotels proved so difficult to obtain that she usually stayed in private residences. In 1921, Anderson received a church-sponsored scholarship for voice lessons with Giuseppe Boghetti, who strengthened her technique and stage presence and taught her operatic roles. With the help of accompanist and manager William “Billy” King, a black pianist, she increased her fee to a hundred dollars per performance. A period of low self-esteem arising from unfavorable reviews deflated her enthusiasm temporarily. The expertise she

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gained from learning foreign languages to augment her vocal talent, in addition to the backing of her mother, sisters, coach, and manager, restored her to earlier levels of confidence. In 1925, after defeating three hundred contenders in a local competition, Anderson won the privilege of appearing with the New York Philharmonic at Lewisohn Stadium under the direction of Eugene Ormandy. Good reviews bolstered her competitiveness. As a result, in 1930, on a National Association of Negro Musicians scholarship, she traveled to Europe to study. While sailing on the Ile de France, she sang for distinguished passengers. The experience proved beneficial to her career, encouraging her to return to Berlin to immerse herself in the German language. Back in the United States, she demonstrated her cosmopolitan training with a cross-country tour. Organized Bigotry It was in the midst of this increasing professional success that Anderson was refused permission by the Daughters of the American Revolution (DAR) to sing at Constitution Hall in Washington, D.C., in 1939. The refusal came solely on account of Anderson’s race. At the time of the turndown, Anderson was on tour in California. She met with interviewers to voice her sadness and shame. In characteristic low-key, nonjudgmental style, she refused to affix blame and noted, by way of explanation, that crusading for racial equality was foreign to her nature. She did, however, alter her personal criteria for performance sites and refused to sing where non-whites were refused admittance. The refusal to let Anderson sing proved embarrassing to the two hundred thousand members of the DAR, an elite women’s historical society founded in 1890 to honor descent from patriots, encourage patriotism and activities related to teaching history, foster genealogical research, honor the American flag and Constitution, found citizenship clubs, award scholarships and medals, assist veterans with disabilities, and generally further Americanism. To save face in response to press stories about their actions, the group’s leaders cited a Washington, D.C., law restricting integrated performances. They insisted that the DAR had in fact challenged bigotry by publicizing the local restrictions that forbade

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Contralto Marian Anderson performs for a crowd of more than 75,000 at the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D. C., on April 9, 1939. (Library of Congress)

Anderson’s performance. This story proved to be false. Other entertainers and leaders came to Anderson’s defense and protested the obvious attempt to hide racial discrimination. As a conciliatory gesture, Eleanor Roosevelt resigned from and broke all ties with the DAR and persuaded Anderson to sing a free Easter concert at the steps of the Lincoln Memorial. The Sunday performance, attended by more than seventy-five thousand people, including government dignitaries, representatives from Howard University, and the secretary of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), showed Anderson’s sincere response to the racist action of an elitist clique. Choked with tears at the sight of so many supporters, Anderson faltered on the words to the national anthem. She drew on her professional training and years of onstage experience to help complete her usual repertoire of hymn tunes, classical arias, and national favorites. She closed with a simple rendition of “America.” Anderson’s performance at the Lincoln Memorial became the focal point of her career. To commemorate her public triumph, the Department of the Interior commissioned a mural. Fellow entertainers of all races boycotted future performances scheduled for Constitution Hall. For her self-control and positive attitude,

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Anderson accepted honors from Eleanor Roosevelt and the king and queen of England. She later entertained at the White House for the inaugural galas of Dwight D. Eisenhower and John F. Kennedy. The policy at Constitution Hall changed in regard to use by nonwhites, and Anderson eventually gave her long-delayed performance. The nationwide notoriety resulting from the Washington rejection and its triumphant aftermath brought Anderson a deluge of opportunities to travel, perform, study, and record. Reluctant to release many of her RCA recordings, she reworked studio performances until they reached her high standards. Her most popular disc, a soulful, intense rendering of “Ave Maria,” marked by her characteristic vibrato and amplitude, sold a quarter of a million copies. International Success Twice Anderson toured Denmark, Sweden, Norway, and Finland, impressing Finns by singing in their language. Royalty, local fans, and notable musicians, especially composer Jean Sibelius, escalated her Scandinavian appearances from mere acclaim to “Marian fever.” European and Asian audiences, particularly Russians and those in other nations under communist regimes, demanded encores of her spirituals, claiming “Deep River” and “Heaven, Heaven” as their favorites. Konstantin Stanislavsky carried a bouquet of lilacs to entice her to sing Carmen. Returning to America in triumph, Anderson came under the management of Russian impresario Solomon Hurok. Under his direction toward new challenges, she accepted tours in Japan, Africa, and South America and gave standing-room-only concerts at New York City’s Town Hall and Carnegie Hall and at the Philadelphia Forum. Far from her original rewards of fifty cents per performance, she earned hefty fees commensurate with her talents. Fans poured out their response to her compassion, which brought them comfort in times of personal crisis. Critics acknowledged her maturing grace, range, control, and musical technique. She performed more than seventy-five concerts per year and had many opportunities she could not accept without overextending her voice and sapping her energies.

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Even with increased audience rapport, racism continued to crop up in correspondence, reviews, and public treatment, especially after Anderson was invited to sing before Nazis in the 1940’s. Following her reply to their questions about race, Hitler’s staff dropped their request for a concert. In the United States, she was presented with the key to Atlantic City, but white hotels refused her requests for a reservation. These unsettling public slurs were somewhat offset by awards and honoraria from fifty universities including Howard, Temple, Smith, Carlisle, Moravian, and Dickinson. At the age of thirty-seven, Anderson received the Spingarn Medal, awarded annually by the NAACP to an African American achiever. A year later, in 1940, she earned the Bok Award, an annual $10,000 prize accorded a native Philadelphian. She used the money to endow the Marian Anderson Scholarship for students of the arts. To assure unprejudiced administration of the annual award, she placed her sister Alyce in charge. In 1943, Anderson left the Philadelphia home she shared with her mother and married architect Orpheus Fisher of Wilmington, Delaware, whom she had met during her school years. The couple built Mariana Farm in a rural setting outside Danbury, Connecticut. Often absent from home on tour, she reserved the summer months for domestic pleasures, particularly sewing, cooking, and gardening. Her particular delight was the success of her strawberry patch. By choice, she had no children so that she could avoid the problem of separation from family while she devoted her life to music. To fill the gap left by voluntary childlessness, she immersed herself in the activities of her sisters’ children, who were frequent visitors to her home. Later Years In middle age, Marian Anderson continued to achieve renown. At the bidding of German fans, she returned to post-Nazi Berlin to perform. In 1955, New York impresario Rudolf Bing organized her debut as Ulrica, the aged sorceress in Giuseppe Verdi’s Un ballo in maschera (1857-1858; The Masked Ball). This performance at the Metropolitan Opera House was the first ever by an African American performer. It made extra demands on her limited stage expe-

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rience, which she met by practicing her acting role and deliberately subduing stage fright. She reprised her part in the opera on tour in Philadelphia, where black fans mobbed the performance. Continuing to refine the role of Ulrica in later appearances, she commented that she felt that perfection of the small character part was an essential part of her training for the operatic stage. At the age of fifty-four, Anderson wrote her autobiography, My Lord, What a Morning (1956), in which she revealed personal reflections on poverty and longing in her childhood, when performing before distinguished audiences lay far outside the grasp of a black singer. Late in her career, having toured Europe and the United States once more, she was named in 1958 as an alternate delegate to the United Nations for her support of human rights. In 1959, two years before formal retirement, she accepted from President Dwight D. Eisenhower the Presidential Medal of Freedom. At the age of seventy-six, she appeared at the Kennedy Center and, as the sole woman among fellow honorees George Balanchine, Arthur Rubinstein, Richard Rodgers, and Fred Astaire, received a national award. The famed singer returned to the spotlight long after the end of her stage career. At the age of eighty-seven, to raise scholarship funds, Anderson, still regal and gracious, presided over a concert at Danbury’s Charles Ives Center. Feted by admirers including Jessye Norman, Isaac Stern, William Warfield, Cicely Tyson, Phylicia Rashad, Connecticut’s governor William A. O’Neil, and President George Bush, she graciously accepted the national acclaim that well-wishers extended. She later became more reclusive but remained a symbol of African American achievement and grace under pressure. Mary Ellen Snodgrass Further Reading Anderson, Marian. My Lord, What a Morning. New York: Viking Press, 1956. Somewhat dated in style and tone, this autobiography nevertheless contains the most factual information on Anderson’s childhood and developing career. Some of the information is sentimentalized, but the author avoids bitterness in recounting prejudicial treatment.

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Keiler, Allan. Marian Anderson: A Singer’s Journey. New York: Scribner, 2000. A definitive biography of Anderson’s life and work. “The Survivors.” Ebony 46 (November, 1990): 28-33. A brief overview of black achievement during a forty-five-year period. The article helps set Marian Anderson among her black peers. Photographs capture worthy scenes of American entertainment history. Sweeley, Michael. “The First Lady.” National Review 41 (September 29, 1989): 65-66. A brief but articulate summary of Anderson’s life and career, with particular emphasis on the open-air concert at the Charles Ives Center. Tedards, Anne. Marian Anderson. American Women of Achievement Series. New York: Chelsea House, 1988. A superb illustrated resource for students, from the point of view of African American achievement. This volume is a must for educators who seek to instruct young people in American history. “A Tribute to Marian Anderson: Famed Contralto Is Honored at Gala Concert in Connecticut.” Ebony 45 (November, 1989): 182-185. A photographic tribute to Anderson’s concert at the Charles Ives Center. The article fills in information about the singer’s retirement and widowhood. Like most accounts of Anderson’s career, the article mentions the DAR snub. Vehanen, Kosti. Marian Anderson, a Portrait. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1970. An undistinguished biography. The lackluster account of Anderson’s life and career bogs down in detail but might prove useful to a researcher or student of music history. See also Harlem Renaissance; Music

Antislavery laws of 1777 and 1807 The Laws: Earliest state and federal laws to abolish slavery Dates: July 2, 1777, Vermont; and March 2, 1807, federal In 1777, Vermont became the first of eight northeastern states to end slavery; the federal government outlawed the slave trade in 1807 but failed to condemn slavery outright, reflecting the young nation’s moral ambiguity.

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On July 2, 1777, Vermont became the first state to abolish slavery fully. Its 1777 Constitution outlawed “holding anyone by law to serve any person” as a servant, slave, or apprentice after he or she reached twenty-one years of age. In 1780, Pennsylvania passed a law gradually abolishing slavery. An attempt five years earlier had failed, partly because opponents argued that abolishing slavery would antagonize the South, where slavery was a deeply embedded institution, and break up the Union during the war for independence from England. Under the Pennsylvania law, any African American not registered as a slave by the end of the year would be considered free; however, children born slaves in 1780 would remain in service to their owners until they were twenty-eight years of age to compensate the owners for the cost of raising them. The law also enabled African Americans to testify against whites in courts and legalized interracial marriage. Abolitionism in the States In Massachusetts, opponents defeated a gradual emancipation bill in 1777, and three years later, voters rejected a constitution that declared all men free and equal and provided voting rights for free blacks. In 1781, however, a slave named Quork Walker sued for his freedom in a state court because his owner had severely abused him. The trial judge, Caleb Cushing, instructed the jury that the idea of slavery conflicted with state law, so Walker was ordered freed. Although the legislature refused to act, by 1790, slavery no longer existed in Massachusetts because of similar court actions in dozens of other cases. During the American Revolution, the New Hampshire legislature gave freedom to any of the state’s six hundred slaves who volunteered for the militia. Other slaves gained their liberty by running away and joining the British military. Thus, when the state’s 1783 constitution declared all men equal and independent from birth, only fifty slaves remained in the state. Although slavery was never abolished legally, slave property was removed from tax roles in 1789 and eleven years later, only eight slaves remained in the state. In 1783, Rhode Island passed a gradual emancipation bill after six Quakers petitioned the state assembly for immediate libera-

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tion for all human beings kept as property. The bill stipulated that all slave children born after March 1 would be apprentices; girls became free at age eighteen, boys at age twenty-one. After slaves were freed, their masters were required to post bonds with the state guaranteeing that the former slaves would never require public assistance. Connecticut, the New England state with the largest population of African Americans, granted freedom to slaves who fought against England, but three times—in 1777, 1779, and 1780— rejected gradual emancipation. In 1784, however, the legislature declared that all adult slaves would be free by the end of the year and that black and mulatto (mixed-race) children would become free at twenty-five years of age. The state also passed discriminatory laws forbidding free blacks to vote, serve on juries, or marry whites. Both New York and New Jersey freed African Americans who served in the army, but these states were slow to enact antislavery laws. New York’s legislature rejected gradual emancipation in 1777. Eight years later, a freedom bill supported by the New York Manumission Society, whose membership included Alexander Hamilton, John Jay, and Aaron Burr, was defeated. In 1785, New York prohibited the sale and importation of slaves and allowed masters to manumit (free) their slaves, but only if they guaranteed that they would not require public assistance. The next year, New Jersey passed similar laws. In 1788, New York declared that slaves would no longer be judged or punished under standards different from those used to judge whites. Although slave auctions ended in both states by 1790, New York did not pass an emancipation bill until 1799. The bill allowed owners to free their slaves regardless of age or condition but permitted them to keep boys until twenty-eight years of age and girls until the age of twenty-five. In 1804, New Jersey became the last of the original northern states to end slavery legally. Neither state allowed free African Americans the right to vote. The 1807 Federal Bill Although these northeastern states had ended slavery, the invention in 1793 of the cotton gin by Eli Whitney had made cotton

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a more profitable crop by greatly increasing the speed at which seeds could be separated from the picked cotton, thus increasing plantation owners’ desire for more cotton pickers. It has been estimated that no fewer than twenty thousand new slaves were imported into Georgia and South Carolina in 1803 alone. In December, 1805, Senator Stephen R. Bradley of Vermont introduced legislation that would prohibit the slave trade beginning in 1808, but the bill was stalled for some months. A similar bill was offered in the House of Representatives by Barnabas Bidwell of Massachusetts, again to no effect. Later that year, President Thomas Jefferson urged passage of the bill in his message to Congress. On March 2, 1807, Congress enacted a law specifying a twenty-thousand-dollar fine and forfeiture of ship and cargo for importing slaves, as well as other penalties for acts ranging from equipping a slave ship to knowingly buying an imported slave. The disposition of illegally imported slaves was left to the states, however. Enforcement of the law was delegated first to the secretary of the treasury and later to the secretary of the navy. Antislavery forces rejoiced in this new and symbolically important law, but enforcement proved weak. An exhaustive census of the slave trade published in 1969 estimated that 1.9 million slaves were imported illegally between 1811 and 1870; more recent research has called that estimate low. Although more than one hundred slave vessels were seized and their officers arrested in the years between 1837 and 1862, and nearly as many cases were prosecuted, convictions were difficult to obtain, and judges often gave light sentences. Another weakness of the 1807 law was that it permitted the continuation of slave traffic between states. An owner could take his slaves into another slave state or, according to the Missouri Compromise of 1820, into a western territory south of 36° north latitude. Robert P. Ellis Leslie V. Tischauser Further Reading Books that discuss the end of slavery in the northeastern states include Gary B. Nash and Jean R. Soderlund’s Freedom by Degrees:

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Emancipation in Pennsylvania and Its Aftermath (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991), Arthur Zilversmit’s The First Emancipation: The Abolition of Slavery in the North (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1967), and Robin Blackburn’s The Overthrow of Colonial Slavery, 1776-1848 (New York: Verso, 1988). John Hope Franklin’s From Slavery to Freedom: A History of Negro Americans (5th ed., New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1980), first published in 1947, is a pioneering study by an African American historian that contains a succinct summary of the enactment of the 1807 law and its aftermath. Warren S. Howard’s American Slavers and the Federal Law: 1837-1862 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1963) is a copiously documented study of violations of the 1807 law during the quarter century before the outbreak of the Civil War. James A. Rawley’s The Transatlantic Slave Trade: A History (New York: W. W. Norton, 1981) surveys the slave trade from its fifteenth century beginnings and places U.S. involvement in its international context. See also Abolition; Emancipation Proclamation; Missouri Compromise; Proslavery argument; Slave codes; Slavery; Underground Railroad

Ashmun Institute Identification: Institution of higher learning created for African Americans that later became Lincoln University Date: Founded on January 1, 1857 Place: Chester County, Oxford, Pennsylvania Lincoln University has remained a predominantly African American school and is proudly recognized as the oldest school with the purpose of educating African American youth. Lincoln University originally opened its doors as Ashmun Institute, on January 1, 1857, in Chester County, Oxford, Pennsylvania. The institute’s purpose was to give African American youth an opportunity to receive a sound, well-balanced education. Although many people through many decades helped to create

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the idea of a school devoted to the higher education of African Americans, John Miller Dickey was the man who put the idea to work. Dickey, the son of a minister and of Scotch-Irish descent, attended Dickinson College in Milton, Pennsylvania. He was graduated in 1824 with a bachelor of arts degree; that fall, he entered the Princeton Theological Seminary to become a Presbyterian minister, following in the footsteps of his many relatives who also were ministers. In 1827, at twenty-one years of age, he was graduated from the seminary and received his first assignment, at the Presbytery of New Castle in Newark, Delaware. In 1829, he received a new assignment in Georgia from the Board of Missions. He found that the slaves in the area listened ardently to his sermons, and he was particularly impressed by their desire to learn. On June 12, 1834, Dickey married Sarah Emlen Cresson, the daughter of a wealthy Quaker family. The marriage was frowned upon by the Quakers because Dickey was a Presbyterian, a religion that the Quakers thought did not hold the same beliefs as they did. For this marriage, Sarah was rejected from the Quaker meeting; nevertheless, the Quaker religion had helped her to develop and continue her support and concern for African Americans, which she took with her into her marriage to John Dickey. Many circumstances led to the founding of Ashmun Institute. The past life of Dickey and his wife played an important role in the school’s founding. John Miller, Dickey’s grandfather, had given money for the education of African American youth in earlier years, and Miller’s acquaintance, Benjamin Franklin, also saw the need for an African American school. Both Dickey and his wife had many relatives who were ardently opposed to slavery. Another reason for Dickey’s interest, according to him, was the kidnapping of two young African American girls, Rachel and Elizabeth Parker. Although both girls were returned to their home, the incident helped Dickey to realize the inherent inequalities in the lives of the African American youth and the difficulties they experienced because they were not given the same opportunities that other young people enjoyed. The death of Dickey’s own child was another factor in his decision to create the institute.

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Breaking Ground Sometime in 1853, Sarah picked the land on which they would establish an institute for the education of youth of African descent in science, art, and theology. In the same year, John Miller Dickey announced his plans for an African American university, which would be called Ashmun Institute. In order to bring the institute into being, a committee was set up to gather funds and secure the Ashmun Institute’s charter through the legislature. By April 29, 1854, the Ashmun Institute Bill was signed by Governor Bigler, allowing for the construction of the new school. Because there were not enough funds to construct the buildings, Dickey used his own money (for which he would later be reimbursed) to finance construction of the president’s house and a schoolroom with attached dormitories. By the fall of 1856, the school was nearly ready to open, and the Reverend John Pym Carter was selected as its first president. Ashmun Institute was named after Jehudi Ashmun, who was born on April 21, 1794, in Champlain, New York. In 1820, four years after graduating from the University of Vermont, he took a job as the editor of The African Intelligencer, a magazine devoted to the movement for African emigration to Liberia promoted by the American Colonization Society, an African American organization. Through his involvement in the magazine, Ashmun learned that a conductor was needed for a trip to Liberia to help take slaves back to their homeland. After working for repatriation of African Americans, he died in 1828 after a long illness. In naming their school after him, the Dickeys memorialized Ashmun for his outstanding work. The first building of Ashmun Institute was dedicated on December 31, 1856, the fifth anniversary of the kidnapping of Rachel and Elizabeth Parker. The First Students Classes at Ashmun Institute began January 1, 1857, with two students, James Ralston Amos and his brother Thomas. The first decades of the institution’s operation were rather difficult— funding continued to be a challenge, and the outbreak of the Civil War (1861-1865) emptied Ashmun Institute’s classroom for a short time. There was concern that the institute would be raided

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as the war began, but no such instances were reported. After the war, there was a surge in enrollment, and the school began to expand. Students at the four-year institute received instruction in geography, history, grammar, composition, elocution, and mathematics. They also received instruction in Greek, Hebrew, and Latin. In addition, the students learned church theology and history, as well as taking courses in prayer and pulpit exercises. Although scholarship was important, each term the students were also evaluated on their other qualities, including piety, talents, diligence, eloquence, prudence, economy, zeal, health, and influence. The curriculum changed and became even more diversified as the school became more established. Creation of Lincoln University On February 7, 1866, the board of the institute began the process to change the name of the institute to Lincoln University in honor of Abraham Lincoln, who had fought so vehemently for the rights of African Americans and who had helped to free them from slavery throughout the United States. The Pennsylvania legislature approved the change of name, and after April 4, 1866, Ashmun Institute was known as Lincoln University. There were many notable presidents of the university as it continued to grow and become a respected institution. Isaac Norton Rendall, who was among the great contributors, was president from 1865 until 1905. In 1945, Horace Mann Bond became the first alumnus of Lincoln University to become its president, as well as the first African American to hold the position. He served in the position until 1957. Lincoln University has remained a predominantly African American school and is proudly recognized as the oldest school with the purpose of educating African American youth. Among the list of graduates are several famous persons, including Langston Hughes, the famous poet and author, in 1929, and Thurgood Marshall, the first African American Supreme Court justice, in 1930. Jeri Kurtzleben

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Further Reading Blassingame, John W., and John R. McKivigan, eds. The Frederick Douglass Papers. Series One. Speeches, Debates, and Interviews. Vol. 4, 1864-1880. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1991. Includes a speech in which Douglass discusses Lincoln University as an example; notes for the speech compares Lincoln University to other African American institutions. Bond, Horace Mann. Education for Freedom: A History of Lincoln University. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1976. A major primary source that gives details of the university’s beginning and growth. Written by a former president of Lincoln University. Brown, M. Christopher, II, and Kassie Freeman, eds. Black Colleges: New Perspectives on Policy and Practice. Westport, Conn.: Praeger, 2004. Drewry, Henry N., and Humphrey Doermann in collaboration with Susan H. Anderson. Stand and Prosper: Private Black Colleges and Their Students. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2001. Hill, Leven, ed. Black American Colleges and Universities. Detroit, Mich.: Gale Research, 1994. Includes a brief university history, current statistics, and enrollment information. Hornsby, Alton, Jr. Chronology of African-American History. Detroit, Mich.: Gale Research, 1991. Includes a short but descriptive history of Ashmun Institute at its beginning and as it changed to Lincoln University. Ploski, Harry A., and James Williams, eds. The African American Almanac: A Reference Work on the African American. Detroit, Mich.: Gale Research, 1989. Places the founding of the institute among other the African American advances. See also Atlanta Compromise; Education; National Council of Colored People; United Negro College Fund

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Atlanta Compromise The Event: Speech by Booker T. Washington offering an accommodation to white Americans Date: September 18, 1895 Place: Atlanta, Georgia Washington’s controversial advocacy of accommodationism has a major influence on African American political and economic strategies. Booker T. Washington, born a slave on a small Virginia plantation, gained his freedom at the end of the Civil War in 1865. He learned to read by studying spelling books and occasionally attending a school for African American children. In 1872, Washington enrolled at Hampton Institute in Virginia, a technical and agricultural school established for emancipated slaves. After graduation, he taught in Malden, West Virginia, then later returned to Hampton Institute. In May, 1881, Washington received an invitation to join a group of educators from Tuskegee, Alabama, to help establish a technical and agricultural college for African American students. Tuskegee Institute opened on July 4, 1881, with Washington as its principal. Washington raised funds, acquired land, supervised the construction of buildings, and recruited talented faculty members. Within a decade, the school had gained a national reputation for providing outstanding technical and occupational training for African American students. In the spring of 1895, Washington was invited to join a planning committee for the forthcoming Atlanta Cotton States and International Exposition, which would highlight the South’s most recent developments in agricultural technology. Washington was asked to deliver one of the key addresses during the exposition’s opening ceremonies, a speech that would focus on the role of African Americans in the South’s agricultural economy. The Address Washington delivered his Atlanta Exposition address on September 18, 1895, to an audience of several thousand listeners. He opened by thanking the directors of the Atlanta Exposition for

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including African Americans in the event and expressing his hope that the exposition would do more to “cement the friendship of the two races than any occurrence since the dawn of our freedom.” Washington went on to predict that the exposition would awaken among both white and black southerners “a new era of industrial progress.” He illustrated his point by telling a parable of a ship lost at sea whose crew members were desperate for fresh water. The captain of another ship, hearing the pleas for water by the captain of the distressed vessel, urged the lost sailors, “Cast down your bucket where you are.” When the captain of the lost ship followed that advice, his crew members brought aboard sparkling fresh water from the Amazon River. Washington then urged his African American listeners to cast down their buckets “in agriculture, mechanics, in commerce, in domestic service, and in the professions.” He said that African Americans would prosper “in proportion as we learn to dignify and glorify common labour and put brains and skill into the common occupations of life.” He added that “no race can prosper till it learns that there is as much dignity in tilling a field as in writing a poem.” Washington also told his white listeners to cast down their buckets among the South’s African Americans, “who have, without strikes and labour wars, tilled your fields, cleared your forests, builded your railroads and cities, and brought forth treasures from the bowels of the earth, and helped make possible this magnificent representation of the progress of the South.” He encouraged white southerners to educate African Americans in “head, heart, and hand” so that they would remain “the most patient, faithful, law-abiding, and unresentful people that the world has seen.” He asserted that in “all things purely social we can be as separate as the fingers, yet one as the hand in all things essential to mutual progress.” Washington concluded his speech by expressing his belief that the “wisest among my race understand that the agitation of questions of social equality is the extremest folly, and that progress in the enjoyment of all the privileges that will come to us must be the result of severe and constant struggle rather than of artificial

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Booker T. Washington. (Library of Congress)

forcing.” He emphasized that African Americans must achieve economic self-reliance before they received “all the privileges of the law.” Washington’s address was enthusiastically received by those present and the press. President Grover Cleveland wrote a congratulatory note. Washington received dozens of invitations to speak around the country and deliver his pragmatic message of economic self-reliance and political accommodationism. Critics Nevertheless, critics of Washington’s philosophy soon surfaced, accusing Washington of making an unsatisfactory compromise by accepting an inferior social and political position for African Americans in exchange for economic opportunities. These critics argued that the tools for economic independence alone would not lead African Americans toward full citizenship and that the widespread segregation of and discrimination against African Americans in the United States, espe-

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cially in the South, was proof of the flaws of Washington’s reasoning. Perhaps the most eloquent critic of Washington’s message was W. E. B. Du Bois. In The Souls of Black Folk (1903), Du Bois, who would later found the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), asserted that Washington “represents in Negro thought the old attitude of adjustment and submission,” that the ideas expressed in what he called Washington’s “Atlanta Compromise” were merely “a gospel of Work and Money” that prompted African Americans to surrender political power, civil rights, and opportunities for higher education. In contrast to Washington, Du Bois advocated that African Americans receive the right to vote, civic equality, and opportunities for higher academic education, as opposed to the kind of occupational training offered at Tuskegee Institute. James Tackach Further Reading Three biographies of Booker T. Washington that discuss the Atlanta address are Stephen Mansfield’s Then Darkness Fled: The Liberating Wisdom of Booker T. Washington (Nashville, Tenn.: Cumberland House, 1999), Louis R. Harlan’s Booker T. Washington: The Making of a Black Leader, 1856-1901 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1972), and Arna Bontemps’s Young Booker: Booker T. Washington’s Early Days (New York: Dodd, Mead, 1972). Booker T. Washington’s Up from Slavery (1901; reprint, New York: Bantam Books, 1970) contains the entire address and a discussion of the events surrounding it. In his The Souls of Black Folk (1903; reprint, New York: Penguin Books, 1989), W. E. B. Du Bois critiques the ideas expressed in Washington’s Atlanta Exposition address. See also Black colleges and universities; Education; National Association for the Advancement of Colored People; Niagara Movement; Talented Tenth; Universal Negro Improvement Association

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Bakke case The Case: U.S. Supreme Court ruling on affirmative action in education Date: 1973-1978 In this ruling, the Supreme Court held that educational institutions may not use rigid quotas in their admissions policies but may take race into account in order to increase minority enrollment. During the 1950’s and 1960’s, the United States made substantial progress in civil rights, aided by Supreme Court decisions that found state-sponsored segregation of the races to be unconstitutional. With its decision in Brown v. Board of Education (1954), the Court signaled that the equal protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution could not be reconciled with public policy that discriminated on the basis of race. The Civil Rights Act of 1964 enacted this idea into legislation. The 1960’s also heralded the beginning of a new effort to correct the wrongs of racial discrimination through the adoption of affirmative action programs. Supporters of affirmative action contended that the removal of legal barriers was inadequate to ensure equality of the races. For example, President Lyndon B. Johnson argued that the effects of years of discrimination could not be erased by the dismantling of legal segregation and that affirmative action to aid those who had been the victims of that discrimination was necessary. Agencies throughout the federal bureaucracy adopted regulations requiring or encouraging the use of affirmative action programs by recipients of federal funds. In response to a regulation of this type from the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare, many colleges and universities throughout the country altered their admissions policies in order to recruit members of minorities more actively. The University of California The University of California at Davis Medical School (UCDMS) enrolled its first class in 1968. There were fifty students, three of whom were Asian and none of whom were African American,

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Hispanic, or American Indian. Almost immediately, the school decided to create a special admissions program that would provide seats in each class for members of disadvantaged minorities. In 1970, eight seats were reserved for special admissions. In 1971, the total class size of the school was doubled to one hundred and the number of special admissions slots was doubled to sixteen. The admissions process became a two-track one, with applicants indicating whether they wanted to be considered as a disadvantaged minority. Persons found to qualify for special admissions competed against each other for the sixteen seats while all other applicants competed for the remaining seats. Applicants for special admissions did not have to meet the same requirements in terms of grade point averages and test scores as those competing in the general admissions process. Between 1968 and 1973, the year Allan Bakke first applied to Davis, the number of minority students enrolled in the medical school rose from three to thirtyone. Allan Bakke was employed as an engineer with the National Aeronautics and Space Administration in California when he decided to apply to medical school in the fall of 1972. He had come to the decision that his true calling was in the practice of medicine. He applied to twelve medical schools that year and was rejected by all of them. Several of the schools cited Bakke’s age, thirty-three, as the cause of the rejection. Bakke had an admissions interview at UCDMS and received high marks in the ranking of candidates for admission but, because of his late application, missed by a few points the cut-off score for the few seats left at that time. Bakke visited the school after being rejected and talked with an admissions officer who encouraged him to apply again the next year and to consider challenging the special admissions program. Bakke believed that he would have been admitted to the school in 1973 if sixteen places had not been set aside. Reverse Discrimination Bakke applied for the 1974 class and was again rejected. This time it appeared that his views on the special admissions program, which he had discussed with an administrator during his interview, had kept him from gaining admission. Bakke decided

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to sue the medical school, arguing that the special admissions program violated his equal protection rights because the sixteenseat quota was allocated purely on the basis of race. Bakke’s case brought to the limelight a new equal protection question: Can members of the white majority be the victims of racial discrimination? Bakke contended that affirmative action programs like the one at the medical school created “reverse discrimination” and were no less a violation of the equal protection clause because the victim was a member of the majority race instead of the minority. UCDMS argued that it had compelling reasons for creating the racial classification. It sought to remedy past societal discrimination that had kept members of minorities from becoming doctors. Additionally, it believed that upon completion of their medical training, minority doctors would be more likely to return to their communities and provide much-needed medical care. Finally, the school contended that ethnic diversity was an important asset to the educational environment and that the special admissions program helped ensure a more diverse student body. The question of “reverse discrimination” had been before the courts only once before. In 1971, Marco DeFunis had challenged a similar special admissions program at the University of Washington Law School which he believed had kept him from being accepted at that school. The trial court agreed with DeFunis’s claim and ordered the school to admit him. The law school complied but appealed the decision against its program. At the appeals level the court sided with the school and the case reached the U.S. Supreme Court in 1974, the same year Bakke began his suit. The DeFunis case received considerable attention and clearly contributed to Bakke’s decision to go ahead with his suit. In April of 1974 the Court decided to dismiss the DeFunis case as moot. DeFunis was about to graduate from the law school and the Court held that no true legal controversy existed any longer. This decision opened the way for Bakke’s case to be the flag bearer for the reverse discrimination argument. The Superior Court of California agreed with Bakke’s position. It found that the special admissions program constituted a racial quota in violation of the constitutions of the nation and the

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state and the Civil Rights Act of 1964. It said that UCDMS could not take race into account in its admissions decisions. It refused, however, to order Bakke’s admission to the school, finding no evidence that Bakke would have been admitted had there been no affirmative action program. Both Bakke and the medical school appealed the decision. In 1976, the Supreme Court of California ruled in Bakke’s favor, holding that the special admissions program was a violation of the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment and that Bakke must be admitted to the medical school. The medical school appealed this decision to the U.S. Supreme Court. Bakke Case Resolved At the end of its 1977-1978 term, the Supreme Court announced its decision. Four justices, led by John Paul Stevens, believed the program to be a violation of Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which forbids discrimination on the basis of race in any program receiving federal funds. These justices believed that the Court should go no further than this in ruling on the case. Four other justices, led by William Brennan, argued that affirmative action programs were acceptable because they remedied the effects upon members of minorities of centuries of discrimination. These justices distinguished between invidious discrimination, which was forbidden by the Fourteenth Amendment, and what they saw as a benign discrimination, which was at the root of affirmative action programs. Some discrimination in favor of members of minorities was necessary if real equality instead of theoretical equality was the goal. Justice Harry Blackmun wrote, “In order to get beyond racism, we must first take account of race. . . . And in order to treat some persons equally, we must treat them differently.” Justice Lewis Powell wrote the decision that, because it allowed each of the other justices to join in at least part, became the ruling of the Court. Powell found that the UCDMS special admissions program was indeed unconstitutional. He argued that the equal protection clause prohibited policies based solely on racial factors unless there was some compelling state interest that could override the very high barrier to such classification. In examining

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the justifications offered by the medical school, he found only the academic interest in diversity convincing. He rejected the argument that past societal discrimination justified affirmative action. Reverse discrimination required a showing that the agency practicing it (in this case, UCDMS) had in the past discriminated. Since the school had opened in 1968 and begun its special admissions program in 1970, no such history of discrimination existed. Powell also rejected the argument that the program was justified because it served the medical needs of disadvantaged minority communities. The medical school could provide no evidence that special admissions doctors were any more likely than others to return to these communities to practice medicine. Powell held that the program could not stand. In this part of his opinion, he was joined by the four justices in the Stevens coalition, creating a majority to strike down the special admissions program and compel Bakke’s admission. Powell did not rule out all affirmative action programs as violations of equal protection. In the medical school’s third justification, diversity, he found some legitimacy because of the traditional freedom granted to academic institutions to set their educational goals. Powell said that the desire for diversity justified some consideration of race as a factor in admissions decisions. The flaw in the UCDMS program was that race appeared to be the only factor shaping decisions for the sixteen seats. In this part of his decision, Powell was joined by the four justices in the Brennan coalition, thus creating a majority for the position that race may be considered as one factor among others in admissions decisions. Impact The landmark Bakke case provided something for both opponents and supporters of affirmative action. While it accepted the idea of “reverse discrimination” made by Allan Bakke and vindicated his rights, it refused to reject the concept of affirmative action altogether. For college admissions officers, it provided a roadmap for how to go about pursuing affirmative action in admissions decisions without violating the equal protection clause. For policymakers in general, it warned against the use of numeri-

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cal quotas for accomplishing affirmative action ends. The division on the Court heralded an extended battle in the courts over which kinds of affirmative action programs would be found to be constitutional and which would not. In the years after Bakke, the courts struggled repeatedly, and contentiously, with questions regarding affirmative action in employment. Bakke raised more questions than it answered and brought to the forefront the breakdown of consensus on civil rights questions in the United States. When the issues of civil rights had been about the dismantling of legal barriers to equality, a broad consensus had existed about the justice of this course of action. It was generally agreed that the Constitution could not permit a legally segregated society. After the landmark desegregation decisions of the 1950’s and 1960’s, the questions became more complicated and the moral imperatives less clear. What kind of equality did the Constitution require? Once the legal requirements of segregation were removed, was there any further affirmative obligation for society to remedy the wrongs of the past? To what extent could individuals not responsible for past discrimination be made to bear the burden for the past? These were questions much more difficult to navigate in the murky waters of constitutional interpretation. For Allan Bakke, the impact was more clear cut. He enrolled in the University of California at Davis Medical School in the fall of 1978. In the spring of 1982, he graduated to a loud round of applause from the audience. For thousands of minority students around the country, the Bakke decision provided new opportunities in higher education. The Court majority permitting race to be considered as one factor ensured that special admissions programs would continue. What can never be calculated is whether more or fewer of these students were provided educational opportunities because of the decision. Katy Jean Harriger Further Reading Anderson, Terry H. The Pursuit of Fairness: A History of Affirmative Action. New York: Oxford University Press, 2004. Provides an excellent summary of the Bakke case.

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Ball, Howard. The Bakke Case: Race, Education, and Affirmative Action. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2000. An analysis of the law and politics that enveloped this case. Dreyfuss, Joel, and Charles Lawrence III. The Bakke Case: The Politics of Inequality. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1979. Written by journalists in a readable narrative style that is sympathetic to arguments for affirmative action. Suggests that the focus of debate on qualifications obscured the underlying economic issues in affirmative action and signaled a fundamental change in race relations in the United States. Eastland, Terry, and William J. Bennett. Counting by Race: Equality from the Founding Fathers to Bakke and Weber. New York: Basic Books, 1979. Presents an argument against pursuit of equality based on numerical quotas. Interesting historical discussion of different conceptions of equality in race relations in the United States. Nieman, Donald G. Promises to Keep: African-Americans and the Constitutional Order, 1776 to the Present. New York: Oxford University Press, 1991. Readable historical essay with a good chapter at the end dealing with debate about affirmative action. Schwartz, Bernard. Behind Bakke: Affirmative Action and the Supreme Court. New York: New York University Press, 1988. Provides behind the scenes insight into the decision-making process of the high court in this landmark case. Sindler, Allan P. Bakke, DeFunis, and Minority Admissions: The Quest for Equal Opportunity. New York: Longman, 1978. Focuses on the issue of how to promote equal opportunity without engaging in reverse discrimination. Useful detailed study of underlying issues and court histories of Bakke and DeFunis cases. Wilkinson, J. Harvie, III. From Brown to Bakke: The Supreme Court and School Integration, 1954-1978. New York: Oxford University Press, 1979. Chronicles role of Supreme Court in desegregation of education and argues that support for decisions breaks down as it moves from principle to imposing remedies of busing and affirmative action.

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Baptist Church

See also Adarand Constructors v. Peña; Affirmative action; Education; Equal Employment Opportunity Commission; Sweatt v. Painter; United Steelworkers of America v. Weber

Baptist Church Identification: Protestant denomination that attracted many African American members This denomination became an amalgamation of African and European forms of religious worship that found expression in the late eighteenth century. The religious revivals collectively known as the first Great Awakening transformed the spiritual climate of British North America by the mid-eighteenth century. Church membership grew and evangelical religious ideas, which emphasized a person’s own relationship with God, began to acquire hegemony over the religious values propagated by the established churches. Among those people who embraced evangelical ideals were African American slaves, who found attractive the notion of a personal God, the hope for salvation, and the less formal style of evangelical worship. This was especially true in the South, where African Americans benefited from a practice among some white evangelicals of allowing African Americans to preach to other African Americans and where African Americans were the targets of white missionary activity. The Baptist Church African Americans were particularly drawn to the Baptist faith, especially in the latter part of the eighteenth century. White Baptists, themselves often among the poorest in southern society, actively recruited African Americans. Furthermore, Baptists did not require formal education as part of ministerial training, and what learning they did encourage centered on mastering the contents of the Bible. Even African Americans held in bondage and denied opportunities for formal education could fulfill these expectations, and more than a few became ministers. African American slaves

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not only joined biracial Baptist churches but also fashioned their own fellowships, where they blended the traditional folk religions they brought from Africa with the evangelical nostrums of the Europeans, thus creating a hybrid African American religion. In the Savannah River Valley, which connected the hinterlands around Augusta, Georgia, with the port city of Savannah, evangelical revivals among whites and African Americans bore organizational fruit among African Americans, who formed their own Baptist church at Silver Bluff, near Augusta, in 1773. About that time, a slave named George Liele heard a sermon preached by the Reverend Matthew Moore, a white minister, and became convinced that he needed to respond to the gospel. Baptized by Moore, Liele became a preacher and began to exhort other slaves in the vicinity of Augusta to become Christians. Liele’s master temporarily had to flee Georgia for his life and freed Liele. For the next several years, Liele and a colleague, David George, preached regularly at the Baptist church in Silver Bluff. George, who was born a slave in Virginia and had run away from a cruel master before coming to the Deep South as the slave of George Galphin, was converted after hearing sermons in the mid-1770’s by several African American preachers, including Liele. George and Liele organized other churches, including the congregation at Yama Craw, outside Savannah, in 1777. Among those who heard Liele preach at Yama Craw was Andrew Bryan, a South Carolina slave baptized by Liele in 1782. Bryan eventually purchased his freedom and devoted himself to his ministry. Although whites who feared an unshackled black man whipped Bryan twice and imprisoned him once, he continued to preach to ever-larger congregations, which often contained both black and white people. In 1788, his congregation constituted itself into the Savannah Georgia First Colored Church, commonly called the Savannah Church. At the time, it boasted 575 members, and it would grow to more than 800 by the time of Bryan’s death. A Fusion of Beliefs The religious teachings of Liele, George, and Bryan fused the African concepts of a unitary universe where the sacred and pro-

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Baptist churches, such as Birmingham’s Sixteenth Street Baptist Church, were major organizational centers during the Civil Rights movement. (Library of Congress)

fane are not segregated, the European mythologies of Heaven, Hell, and redemption, and their present reality of slavery. God would help Africans through their travail of slavery and would one day lead them out of bondage. In this melding process, certain African religious practices were proscribed. The church covenant of Liele’s Yama Craw Church specifically banned the consumption of blood and strangled meat of animals offered to idols, which had been a part of some West African religious rituals. Other African practices were given an important place, such as moaning as part of religious singing. This practice originated in ecstatic African religious rituals, and moaning and wailing have been preserved in southern gospel singing. This hybrid religious ritual did not confine itself to African American communities. The emotional shouts and ritual cadences of African worship affected the rhythms of white discourse as well, especially the sermon form, in which the preacher and congregation engage in something of a dialogue. Both Liele and George eventually fled the South for the British Empire, seeking to continue their ministerial work without

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the specter of slavery hanging over them. Liele went to Jamaica, establishing the first Baptist churches there. George went to Canada, where he worked with both black and white people before organizing a Back-to-Africa movement, in which a thousand black Canadians went with George to Sierra Leone in 1792. Bryan, however, remained in the South, calling upon African Americans to lead better lives and, sometimes stealthily, urging whites to live out the Golden Rule in dealing with African Americans. By establishing churches that counseled patience while teaching a theology of ultimate deliverance, African American leaders like Liele, George, and Bryan helped African Americans survive slavery by encouraging them to expect freedom soon. Edward R. Crowther Further Reading Black Church Beginnings: The Long-Hidden Realities of the First Years (Grand Rapids, Mich.: W. B. Eerdmans, 2004) by Henry H. Mitchell and Gayraud S. Wilmore’s Black Religion and Black Radicalism: An Interpretation of the Religious History of African Americans (3d ed. rev. and enlarged. Maryknoll, N.Y.: Orbis Books, 1998) both provide information on the Baptist church. LeRoy Fitts’s A History of Black Baptists (Nashville, Tenn.: Broadman Press, 1985) presents a sympathetic and readable account of black Baptist leaders and churches. C. Eric Lincoln and Lawrence H. Mamiya’s The Black Church in the African American Experience (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1990) is a well-written survey of African American churches since their earliest times and their meaning in the African American struggle in the United States. Editor Gayraud S. Wilmore’s African American Religious Studies: An Interdisciplinary Anthology (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1989) contains a series of essays that may help readers interpret the fragmentary documentary record of early African American religious life. Milton C. Sernett’s Afro-American Religious History: A Documentary Witness (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1985) contains letters from Bryan and Liele and many other representative documents of the African American religious experience.

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Baseball’s racial integration

See also African Methodist Episcopal Church; African Methodist Episcopal Zion Churches; Black Christian Nationalist Movement; Black church; Church burnings; Free African Society; Slavery

Baseball’s racial integration The Event: Jackie Robinson’s breaking of the color line in Major League Baseball Date: 1947 Place: Brooklyn, New York Until Jackie Robinson established himself as a major-league player, opening the way for other African Americans, professional baseball was rigidly segregated in North America. In 1945, the United States was both triumphant and troubled. The most powerful nation in the world in the aftermath of World War II, the United States measured its strength not only in military and economic terms but also in the supposed moral superiority of American democracy. In 1945, however, segregation and racial exclusion remained the norms in American society. Even the U.S. armed forces were largely segregated. In the years following the war, Americans would have to come to terms with the gap between what their democracy was supposed to be and what it was. In this context, organized baseball extended an opportunity to African Americans and, in so doing, lost its status as a racist institution. Background The change did not come easily and might have been significantly delayed if not for Branch Rickey, the president of the Brooklyn Dodgers. The color line that excluded African Americans from organized baseball had its origins in the previous century and was solidly established. In 1923, it had been reinforced by an informal agreement among the major-league owners. This agreement was still very much in force in 1945, when Rickey decided to proceed with his plan to bring down baseball’s color barrier.

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Finding skilled African American players was not a problem. Although they were excluded from organized baseball, African Americans had not stopped playing the game. Barnstorming professional and semiprofessional teams and eventually entire “Negro” leagues arose, with the level of play comparable to that of the major and top minor leagues. Negro League teams often beat white all-star teams during the off-season. Separate, however, was not equal. African American players were paid much less and had to spend far more time traveling than white players. Nor did the Negro Leagues enjoy the stability of organized baseball. As a result, a pool of talented African American players was available to Rickey. The integration of baseball had previously been advocated by African American sportswriters such as Sam Lacy of the Baltimore Afro-America and Wendell Smith of the Pittsburgh Courier. What Rickey brought to the issue was clout. He had the position and personality to do something about integrating baseball and to deal with any opposition that might arise. As with other civil rights advances of the 1940’s, 1950’s, and 1960’s, there was stern opposition. Other major-league owners were opposed to Rickey’s experiment. They argued that white fans and players were not ready for integration. Rickey believed that the time was right, and he pushed ahead. Rickey’s motivation has been the subject of considerable debate. He claimed to be acting on religious and moral grounds, but he undoubtedly was aware of the growing economic success of the Negro Leagues and the wealth of talent they might offer to the Dodgers. On the other hand, Rickey did not monopolize the best African American prospects, even recommending star outfielder Monte Irvin to the rival New York Giants. While motives are complex and difficult to discern, one thing is clear: Rickey had an unshakable belief in what he was doing. Rickey’s Choice The question of who would shoulder the burden of breaking the color line was a difficult one. Rickey and other advocates of integration knew that the honor of being that person would be at least equaled by the ordeal, and that even a very strong in-

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dividual might be broken by the twofold pressure of competing on the major-league level and being a crusader for racial justice. Because of the demanding job description, Rickey saw his choice to be one of awesome importance. It was Wendell Smith who recommended Jackie Robinson. Rickey had Robinson scouted and interviewed him. All the qualifications were there. Robinson was college educated and had played his college ball (three sports) on integrated teams. At twenty-six years of age, Robinson was mature but still in his prime. He also had demonstrated his dedication to the cause of racial equality, struggling against segregation while serving in the armed forces. Rickey saw in Robinson a man with fire in his belly, great self-control, and superb baseball skills. Robinson saw both an athletic and social challenge. With the support of his wife, Rachel, he decided to accept the challenge, signing a contract to play in the Dodger organization. One obstacle had to be overcome before the Jackie Robinson experiment could begin. Rickey wanted Robinson to acclimate himself to organized baseball in the minor leagues for one year. In order for Robinson to be optioned to the Dodgers’ minor league team in Montreal, the other major-league owners would have to approve. None of them did. Into this impasse stepped the new commissioner of baseball, Happy Chandler, a former Kentucky politician and veteran of public life. The previous commissioner, Judge Kenesaw Mountain Landis, had been an uncompromising opponent of integration. Indeed, it was Landis more than anyone who had engineered and maintained the 1923 agreement outlawing interracial play. Chandler had inherited Landis’s autocratic power but not his attitude on the color line. Despite considerable pressure from the owners, Chandler overruled their fifteen-toone vote against Rickey, allowing Robinson to begin his career in organized baseball in the spring of 1946. Later, Chandler claimed he made his decision because he did not wish to explain to his Creator that he had denied a fellow human being a chance to play baseball because of the color of his skin. Chandler’s political sense was also astute. He correctly surveyed the political winds and realized that the criticism he took for allowing Robinson to play would have been dwarfed by the damage to his image if

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he had championed the cause of segregation. Americans were changing, not entirely or all at once, but enough to shift the tide on matters of race. Then it was up to Robinson. He came through in every respect. He led Montreal to a league championship, winning the respect of International League players and fans alike. He proved that he could keep his mind on the game of baseball while putting up with verbal abuse and physical intimidation in the form of brushback pitches and high spikes. Playing half of his games in Montreal, a multicultural Canadian city, probably helped, but Robinson had clearly proved his mettle. The following spring, Robinson made the Dodgers’ roster, playing his first regular-season major-league game on April 15, 1947. Although Robinson got off to a slow start, he believed that his teammates were behind him. (This might not have been the case had Rickey not traded several Dodger players who refused to play with an African American.) Opposing teams were another matter. They rode Robinson unmercifully, as was the custom of the time with all rookies, often making race the focus of their comments. In living up to his agreement with Rickey, Robinson turned the other cheek to such comments to avoid jeopardizing his cause by touching off a feud or a brawl. Sympathetic reporters such as Walter Winchell tried to ease Robinson’s burden by criticizing the worst offenders in their publications, a gesture for which Robinson later expressed gratitude. Soon Robinson began to play well, proving himself to be an excellent hitter and base runner as well as a versatile fielder. Robinson on the Field By the end of the year, Robinson had batted .297, won Rookie of the Year honors, and, quite literally, revolutionized baseball. The Dodgers won the National League pennant. With Robinson and many other African American players, they would win five more pennants in the next nine years, becoming a convincing testament to the possibilities of interracial cooperation. The other owners had been proved wrong. White players and fans overwhelmingly accepted integration, rejecting a past which most Americans were more than willing to forget.

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The cost to Robinson was significant. His hair turned prematurely gray, and he spent many years recovering from the trauma of his groundbreaking achievement. He had made himself a target in order to rub out baseball’s color line. For this Robinson suffered, but he never expressed regret. Impact The initial and most obvious impact of Jackie Robinson’s triumph over the color line in baseball was to open up career opportunities for other African American players in organized baseball. Moved primarily by the need to stay competitive (the Dodgers dominated the National League for a decade with the help of African American players such as Robinson, Roy Campanella, Joe Black, Don Newcombe, and Jim Gilliam), and in the absence of the dire consequences they had predicted, other owners began to scout and sign talented African American players. There was still hesitancy on the part of some franchises, most notably the New York Yankees and Boston Red Sox, but by 1959 every major-league team had been integrated. Baseball had been successfully transformed into a symbol of racial equality and harmony rather than one of hypocrisy and frustrated dreams.

Jackie Robinson in 1951. (National Baseball Library)

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The indirect benefits of baseball’s integration were also substantial. Understood not as a first cause, but as an important link in the chain of events, it facilitated later gains such as Brown v. Board of Education (1954), which desegregated schools, and the Civil Rights Acts of 1957, 1964, and 1965, which addressed other forms of segregation, job discrimination, and voting rights. The integration of baseball had rendered absurd the contention that the races were incapable of interacting fruitfully for common ends. Clearly, if athletes of different races could play together, people of different races could work and live together. Equal opportunity in baseball was clearly analogous to that throughout American society. Finally, baseball’s integration fostered bonds between white fans and African American players. This made it less likely that white northerners would accept segregation and other forms of racial injustice passively, as they had in the past. It is a mistake, however, to see Jackie Robinson’s triumph over baseball’s color line as a signal that racial justice and equality are no longer problematic issues in American society. While the player rosters of organized baseball teams became thoroughly integrated, African Americans remain clearly underrepresented in managerial, coaching, and front-office positions. There have, in addition, been charges of remaining discrimination on the field. Specifically, it has been alleged that players of marginal ability have better chances to make big-league rosters if they are white. Similarly, pockets of racial prejudice continued to exist among fans. Moreover, the existence of a pool of well-paid African American athletes is a misleading indicator of economic distribution according to race. African Americans continue to make up a disproportionate number of America’s poor. Equality of opportunity and education remain goals of American society rather than accomplishments. It has also been alleged that there were negative consequences to the integration of baseball. Obviously damaged by organized baseball’s integration were the Negro Leagues, which had enjoyed their greatest success during the war years. While much of the profit from the Negro Leagues went into the hands of white promoters and agents, they still can be seen as an early enterprise in black capitalism, one for which Branch Rickey and Jackie Rob-

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inson did no good at all. It has also been argued that the integration of baseball hindered the development of alternative, separatist routes to true racial equality. Finally, because of the way he turned his cheek in response to various kinds of abuse from white players, Jackie Robinson has been seen as too passive a role model. None of these limitations, allegations, or problems should diminish appreciation of Jackie Robinson. They simply encourage the acceptance of his character and accomplishments for what they were rather than the distortion of them for one purpose or another. Jackie Robinson did not manage to strike down racism with a single blow. Nor was he an “Uncle Tom” by any means. He was a fine athlete with highly developed social values and the courage to back them up. Perhaps most impressive was Robinson’s refusal to become rigid in his thinking. As the terrain of race relations in the United States changed toward the end of his life, Robinson changed his political affiliation, citing the Republican Party’s lack of commitment to the cause of racial equality. Recognizing the need for new initiatives rather than worship of the past, Robinson never presented his own experience as a reason for complacency. He saw clearly that the quest for racial justice was an ongoing struggle. Ira Smolensky Further Reading Aaron, Hank. I Had a Hammer. New York: HarperCollins, 1991. Describes Aaron’s early experience as one of relatively few African American players, his hall-of-fame career, and his subsequent frustration with the failure of baseball owners to integrate management and coaching staffs fully. Includes a chilling account of the hate mail Aaron received because of his race as he approached and ultimately surpassed Babe Ruth’s record for lifetime home runs. Frommer, Harvey. Rickey and Robinson: The Men Who Broke Baseball’s Color Barrier. New York: Macmillan, 1982. Provides a rich portrait of the two figures central to the Jackie Robinson story. Kahn, Roger. The Boys of Summer. New York: Harper & Row, 1972. A sport journalist’s “then and now” portraits of Jackie Robin-

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son and selected teammates on the Dodgers. Remarkable for its frankness and depth of feeling. Myrdal, Gunnar. An American Dilemma: The Negro Problem and American Democracy. New York: Harper & Row, 1962. Originally published in 1945, Myrdal’s book went into great detail and pulled no punches in its portrayal of American racism. A Swedish sociologist, Myrdal served the United States well in the role of social conscience, propelling Americans toward experiments in racial equality. Peterson, Robert W. Only the Ball Was White. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1970. Describes life in the Negro Leagues. Also quotes from a 1923 agreement by white team owners that continued and formalized the exclusion of African American players. Robinson, Jackie, with Wendell Smith. Jackie Robinson: My Own Story. New York: Greenberg Press, 1948. A straightforward account of Robinson’s athletic career and experience breaking organized baseball’s color line. Contains many photographs. Also notable is the participation of Smith, who wrote for the Pittsburgh Courier, an African American paper. It was Smith who recommended Robinson to Branch Rickey. Simon, Scott. Jackie Robinson and the Integration of Baseball. Hoboken, N.J.: J. Wiley & Sons, 2002. Tygiel, Jules. Baseball’s Great Experiment: Jackie Robinson and His Legacy. New York: Oxford University Press, 1983. Written by a professional scholar, this work is a thoroughly researched social history. As such, it casts light not only on the personalities involved in the Jackie Robinson story but also on the broader social and historical context in which these individuals operated. Tygiel follows up the Robinson story by examining racial integration of all the major league teams and the subsequent issue of organized baseball’s integration on the management level. He considers the Jackie Robinson “experiment” to be ongoing rather than successfully completed. Voight, David Q. America Through Baseball. Chicago: Nelson-Hall, 1976. Chapter 8, “American Baseball and the American Dilemma,” presents a thought-provoking critique of the so-called Jackie Robinson myth: the belief that Robinson’s entry into

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baseball somehow fostered or signaled a golden age of racial equality. Woodward, C. Vann. The Strange Career of Jim Crow. New York: Oxford University Press, 1957. A classic, highly readable account of segregation in the American South. See also Journey of Reconciliation; Military desegregation; Segregation; Sports

Batson v. Kentucky The Case: U.S. Supreme Court ruling on jury selection Date: April 30, 1986 The Supreme Court ruled that the equal protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment forbids a prosecutor from using peremptory challenges to remove potential jurors because of their race. James Batson, an African American, was indicted for seconddegree burglary. When the judge conducted a voir dire examination (preliminary check of suitability and qualifications) of the potential jurors, the prosecutor used his peremptory challenges to remove all four African Americans from the panel, resulting in an all-white jury. The Supreme Court had refused to disturb the same development in Swain v. Alabama (1965). After Batson’s conviction, nevertheless, his lawyers asserted that the process of jury selection violated his rights to equal protection and to a jury drawn from a cross section of the community. By a 7-2 majority, the Court accepted Batson’s claim. Speaking for the majority, Justice Lewis F. Powell, Jr., remanded the case and instructed the trial court to require the prosecutor to justify the exclusion of members of the defendant’s race from the jury. If the prosecutor were unable to give a racially neutral explanation, Batson’s conviction would have to be reversed. Powell’s opinion formulated a framework for future voir dire proceedings. The basic idea is that a pattern of exclusion based on race creates an inference of discrimination. Once such an inference is established, the prosecutor has the burden of showing that the peremptories

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are not discriminatory. Emphasizing that the Constitution does not guarantee a right to peremptory challenges, Powell wrote that potential jurors may not be eliminated simply because of the assumption that people of a particular race might be more sympathetic to a particular defendant. Thus, Powell’s opinion requires color-conscious rather than color-blind procedures in jury selection, and it tends to encourage the use of racial quotas. The Batson principles have been significantly expanded. In Powers v. Ohio (1991), the Court held that criminal defendants may object to race-based peremptory challenges even if the defendant and the excluded jurors do not belong to the same race. Later that year, in Edmonson v. Leesville Concrete Company, the Court applied the Batson framework to the selection of juries in civil trials. In Georgia v. McCollum (1992), the Court decided that the Batson ruling applies to defense attorneys. In J. E. B. v. Alabama (1994), moreover, the Court held that the equal protection clause prohibits discrimination in jury selection on the basis of gender. Thomas Tandy Lewis See also Edmonson v. Leesville Concrete Company; Moore v. Dempsey; Norris v. Alabama; Powers v. Ohio; Strauder v. West Virginia; Williams v. Mississippi

Birmingham March The Event: Protest march against segregation Date: April 4-May 7, 1963 Place: Birmingham, Alabama A series of demonstrations in Birmingham, Alabama, sponsored by the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), were designed to draw attention to the violent racism that underlay white southerners’ defense of segregation. A disappointing campaign in Albany, Georgia, in 1962, prompted the Southern Christian Leadership Conference to select Birmingham, Alabama, as its subsequent target for nonviolent demonstrations. Protests against segregation had failed in Albany be-

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cause the city’s chief of police, Laurie Pritchett, had held white mobs at bay and prevented the violent confrontations between police and protesters that would produce media coverage. Martin Luther King, Jr., and other SCLC leaders met in Savannah, Georgia, at the end of 1962 to plan a series of demonstrations in Birmingham, a city noted for its racial violence and uncompromising stand against the Civil Rights movement. The strategists hoped to gain national attention by provoking Birmingham officials into explicit displays of racial antagonism, thereby revealing the true face of southern segregation. The March Project C, the SCLC’s code name for its assault on segregation in Birmingham, proceeded in three stages. First, on the morning of April 4, 1963, an economic boycott of downtown businesses went into effect, and small groups began staging sit-ins at downtown lunch counters. After Police Chief Eugene “Bull” Conner ordered arrests, the protest caught the attention of the media and the administration of President John F. Kennedy. Stage two began on April 6 with daily marches on city hall. As the protest leaders had expected, the Birmingham police arrested all of the demonstrators while flashbulbs popped and television cameras whirred. King himself was arrested and during his incarceration penned his “Letter from Birmingham Jail,” an eloquent statement of the motivations that guided the Civil Rights movement. Police began to respond to the daily marches with less and less restraint, and African Americans began turning out for the marches in ever-larger numbers and tightened the economic boycott. The sit-ins, protest marches, and police violence had riveted a national audience to their television sets by the time the third stage began on May 2. That morning, more than one thousand African American children exited the Sixteenth Avenue Baptist Church as adult spectators cheered them on. The “children’s crusade” sang and danced its way into the paddywagons waiting to take them to jail. Extensive criticism of the decision to use children rained down from both sides of the struggle, but King and the other leaders had little choice. Adults had become reluctant to march and serve jail time. More important, the protest leaders recognized that the

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sight of children being arrested would stir the heart of the nation. The police actions—beating and turning fire hoses on protesters— and their continued brutality were captured by the media as the marches and arrests continued until May 7. The Senior Citizen’s Committee, which had been organized by the Birmingham Chamber of Commerce to handle racial matters, feared that continued racial violence would drive away business and permanently damage the city’s reputation. On the afternoon of May 7, they met in secret session and ordered their negotiators to open talks with the SCLC. After three days of negotiations, the two sides reached an agreement that called for the desegregation of public accommodations, nondiscrimination in the hiring and promoting of African American workers in Birmingham industries, and the formation of a biracial committee. Even though the SCLC compromised and allowed gradual rather than immediate implementation of these measures, the demonstrations in Birmingham were considered a significant victory for the movement. Impact Public reaction to the events in Birmingham, along with the easing of Cold War tensions, convinced President Kennedy that the time had come for federal action in defense of civil rights, and he asked Congress for civil rights legislation. The Civil Rights Act of 1964 was signed into law on July 2 by President Lyndon B. Johnson, Kennedy’s successor. The act prohibited segregation of public accommodations, made discrimination by employers and unions illegal, and created the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. The broader impact of the march was to change the tone of the Civil Rights movement from gradualism to immediacy; the African American community was no longer willing to wait for decent jobs, adequate housing, and a quality education. The march also marked the entry of poor and unemployed African Americans into the struggle. Robert E. McFarland Further Reading Accounts of the Birmingham march can be found in Diane McWhorter’s Carry Me Home: Birmingham, Alabama, the Climactic

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Battle of the Civil Rights Revolution (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2001), S. Jonathan Bass’s Blessed Are the Peacemakers: Martin Luther King, Jr., Eight White Religious Leaders, and the “Letter from Birmingham Jail” (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2001), Harvard Sitcoff’s The Struggle for Black Equality (1993), and Taylor Branch’s Parting the Waters: America in the King Years, 1954-1963 (1988). See also Civil Rights Act of 1964; Civil Rights movement; Million Man March; Million Woman March; Poor People’s March on Washington; Selma-Montgomery march; Southern Christian Leadership Conference; Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee

Black cabinet Identification: Informal body of African American officials in the federal government Date: Mid-1930’s The black cabinet had no dramatic impact on federal policies but made white New Dealers more responsive to African American problems. The black cabinet was formed by more than a dozen African American men and women who had been appointed to federal positions by President Franklin D. Roosevelt by the year 1935. Known as the Federal Council on Negro Affairs after 1935, it was an informal gathering of African American advisers from various New Deal agencies led unofficially by Mary McLeod Bethune, the director of the National Youth Administration’s Division of Negro Affairs. Its members included Robert Weaver, the Negro Affairs adviser in the Public Works Administration, and William Hastie, assistant solicitor in the Department of the Interior. Several other cabinet members later became nationally prominent. They usually met at the homes of Bethune and Weaver and informally had some impact on New Deal agencies. First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt often provided the impetus behind certain changes after meeting with Bethune.

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The appointment of African Americans to federal positions symbolized the attempt by some New Dealers to eradicate racial injustice in the United States and influenced some African Americans to convert from the Republican to the Democratic Party. President Roosevelt, however, ultimately did not challenge the more intransigent elements of a still segregated society. Still, although the black cabinet did not dramatically alter federal government policies toward African Americans because the appointments were not at the highest levels and its membership was fluctuating, it made white New Dealers more responsive to African American problems. David L. Porter See also Politics and government; Summit Meeting of National Negro Leaders; Talented Tenth

Black Christian Nationalist Movement Identification: Religious movement emphasizing the ethnic characteristics of African Americans Date: Late 1960’s The movement correlated black Protestantism in the United States with African American heritage, culture, and political values. African American Protestants have often had a sense of separation from other Christians in the United States, mostly because of slavery, segregation, and the formation of African American churches and denominations within the black community. This separation led to belief systems that stressed the history of oppression among African Americans and often likened them to the ancient Israelites living in slavery. This biblical analogy allowed African American Christians to interpret themselves as a religious people who were distinct, a people with their own national characteristics. The interpretation was supported in the 1960’s and later by nationalistic political movements among African

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Americans who were secular but dependent on the support of churches and religious organizations. The movement termed Black Christian Nationalism is not one event but a series of occurrences including the establishment of congregations based on Black Christian Nationalist ideology, the publication of writings by major African American theologians, and the dissemination of the movement’s ideas, which found varying levels of receptivity among religious African Americans. The most institutionalized example of Black Christian Nationalism was the formation during the 1960’s of churches called The Shrine of the Black Madonna in Detroit, Michigan, and some southern cities by the Reverend Albert Cleage. The foremost African American theologian promoting these ideas was Professor James Cone of Union Theological Seminary in New York City, author of Black Theology and Black Power (1969) and Black Theology of Liberation (1970). These explicit examples, however, do not capture the much broader dissemination of Black Christian Nationalist ideas. Younger, more formally educated pastors of African American Protestant congregations—denominations such as Methodists, Presbyterians, and Baptists—had been influenced by both biblical analogies and current events of the 1960’s. These pastors preached sermons comparing the plight of African Americans to the Israelites, stressing that African Americans in the United States were a separate nation that had been conquered by the larger surrounding white nation. They called for obedience to a God who was on the side of oppressed people, a Jesus who was dark skinned and non-European, and for identification with the nation of African Americans. The less-educated, more evangelical holiness and Pentecostal ministers were less influenced by the ideas of Black Christian Nationalism. Some black Catholic priests interpreted Black Christians as a religious group for a separate “nation” of African Americans within the United States. Impact The somewhat disassociated congregations, writings, and dissemination of ideas by young educated pastors that make up Black Christian Nationalism drew on two resources: an interpre-

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tation of the Bible associating African Americans with the enslaved people of God, the Israelites, and the Civil Rights and Black Power movements of the 1960’s that clarified what constituted an oppressed nation within a nation. As Black Christian Nationalist views began to influence pastors and congregations, churches often abandoned the idea of the separation of church and state, and politics were considered a part of religious commitment. Being African American was identified as distinct from being any other sort of American, and religious organizations were perceived as the appropriate place to announce the religiouspolitical ideology of Black Christian Nationalism. William Osborne Max C. E. Orezzoli Further Reading For Professor Cone’s major ideas, see God of the Oppressed (1975). For a history of the subject see Gayroud Wilmore’s Black Religion and Black Radicalism (1973). For a discussion of the relation between traditional Christianity and black nationalist feeling, see Major Jones’s Christian Ethics for Black Theology (1974). See also Black church; Black nationalism; Black Power movement; Church bombings; Nation of Islam; Republic of New Africa; Southern Christian Leadership Conference

Black church Definition: Collective term for the many autonomous denominations of African American Christian churches The black church evolved as a highly visible social institution in response to white racism in American society and racism in whitedefined Christianity. Although African American religious experience is diverse and social forms of religious life vary greatly, the black church has historically been the most visible religious institution in African American culture. As a visible institution controlled from within

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the black community, the black church has played a central role in African American social and political history. This history has evolved within the broader historical context of American racism and racial politics. The church, also evolving within that broader context, has been an important center for the development of African American Christian theology and for community identity. The black church originated as a formal institution when African American religious leaders in Philadelphia were forcibly removed from worshiping on the main “whites only” floor of St. George’s Methodist Episcopal Church. When Richard Allen and Absalom Jones were evicted from the church in 1787, they and their fellow black Christians concluded that the racism of whitedefined Christianity precluded full Christian expression for African Americans in white-controlled congregations. Their formation of the Free African Society that year paved the way for the later creation of the fully autonomous African Methodist Episcopal (AME) Church, one of the earliest black churches in the United States. An institutionalized form of distinct African American Christian theology began to emerge. Lincoln/Mamiya Model In their expansive sociological study entitled The Black Church in the African-American Experience (1990), C. Eric Lincoln and Lawrence H. Mamiya propose a dynamic model for interpreting the sociology of black churches in their diversity and complexity. Lincoln and Mamiya identify the major black denominations as the AME Church, the AME Zion Church, the Christian Methodist Episcopal (CME) Church, the National Baptist Convention, U.S.A., Incorporated (NBCA), the Progressive National Baptist Convention (PNBC), and the Church of God in Christ (COGIC). These denominations, as well as many other smaller ones and local churches, provide institutional structure for the religious (and often political) life of millions of African American Christians. Although sociologists and political historians debate the nature of the black church and its political role, Lincoln and Mamiya offer a “dialectical model of the black church” that encourages an open and ongoing analysis. The Lincoln/Mamiya model offers a

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Black churches have played central roles in African American communities since the early nineteenth century, when they offered welcoming sanctuaries away from white oversight. (Library of Congress)

way of analyzing the ongoing tensions, both theological and political, within African American Christianity as those tensions are embodied in the structure of the black church. The model proposes the following six “dialectically related” pairs, or opposites. With these pairs the focus is on the ways that human experience shifts back and forth between the two opposites, sometimes tending more toward one idea, sometimes tending more toward the other. For example, the first dialectic is that between “priestly” and “prophetic” functions of the church. In other words, it concerns how the church balances its role as the center for worship (priestly) in relation to its role as an agent for social change in the community (prophetic). Second, there is a dialectic tension in the black church between the “other-worldly” and the “this-worldly.” Does the church focus on individual spiritual salvation for the “life to come” or does it focus on social justice in the here-and-now? The third dialectic proposed by Lincoln and Mamiya is between “universalism” and “particularism”: how the black church negotiates

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its role in Christianity, broadly speaking, and its very particular role in African American history. The black church is part of a universal religious institution but is also a very particular response to white racism in American Christianity. A fourth dialectic is between the “communal” and the “privatistic”: How does the church address individual spiritual life in the context of the social realities of African American experience? The fifth dialectic is especially important politically; it is between the “charismatic” and the “bureaucratic.” This involves how the church uses the power of personalized and local leadership in relation to developing larger-scale institutional structure and national leadership as well as how it handles the tensions inherent in doing both. Finally, Lincoln and Mamiya join many African American historians and cultural critics when they identify the dialectical tension between “accommodation” and “resistance.” Given the realities of white racism and African American history’s origins in the experience of slavery, how has a primary social institution such as the black church moved between accommodating and resisting white mainstream culture in the United States? Politics and the Church It is in this final dialectic that much of the debate over the role of the black church in the twentieth century Civil Rights movement evolved. It is debated, for example, whether the church served as an accommodationist spiritual escape that diluted the intensity of its members, whether the church served as a fundamental source of activism and militancy, or whether the black church did both. During the 1950’s and the 1960’s, the Civil Rights movement accelerated and moved to the center of the national political stage. Beginning with efforts to integrate schools following the Supreme Court’s Brown v. Board of Education decision in 1954 and continuing through the Montgomery bus boycott (1955-1956), the formation of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (1957), the Freedom Rides summer (1961), and the March on Washington (1963), hundreds of thousands of African Americans confronted American racism and fought for fulfillment of the stated U.S. commitment to freedom for all its people. The black

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church played a central role during these years, providing people and resources for grassroots organizing while cultivating leadership for the national movement. During this period, tensions arose in the black community that illustrate the sociological complexity of the church as a social institution. From the perspective of the emerging Black Power movement, the church was suspect in its adherence to Christian principles of nonviolence in the face of white racial violence and was deluded in its emphasis on integration into mainstream American society. For black nationalists, this mainstream society remained white-dominated and white-controlled. Some nationalists argued that African American Christianity itself was flawed because of its origins as a religion of enslavement. From another perspective, political and religious leaders such as Martin Luther King, Jr., proposed that African American Christianity provided both the spiritual and material bases for a militant liberation theology, one that posed a radical challenge to the white-supremacist status quo of the mid-twentieth century United States. King was a nationally recognized Christian leader, but with him were thousands of African American Christian women and men who argued that the black church provided the path of most, rather than least, resistance to white racism. As Lincoln and Mamiya point out, the fact that white racists bombed several hundred black churches during the civil rights period indicates that the threat posed to white supremacy by the black church was substantial. A second debate that highlights some of the issues from the Lincoln/Mamiya model concerns the role of women in the black church. During the Civil Rights movement, women provided the “rank and file” of many organizing efforts, working together with men to form the core of the movement. In the church, however, men still maintained a monopoly in terms of formal congregational leadership. On the national level, this trend was even more pronounced; the nationally recognized black leadership of the Civil Rights movement was almost exclusively male. Women such as Rosa Parks, Fannie Lou Hamer, and Mamie Bradley (Emmett Till’s mother) were recognized on a national level, but the political leadership of black women in many key political bat-

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tles, especially on the local level, went unacknowledged both in the national media and in the formal leadership structure of the church. Gender politics are significant because they highlight tensions within the church when issues that are often expressed in secular political terms (such as women’s oppression) are also engaged in theological and spiritual terms. This can result in significant structural change within a social institution such as the black church. In the case of women and the church, the political becomes religious and the religious becomes political, bringing into play the dynamic tensions between the “this-worldly” and the “other-worldly,” between the “priestly” and the “prophetic.” Sharon Carson Further Reading Black Church Beginnings: The Long-Hidden Realities of the First Years (Grand Rapids, Mich.: W. B. Eerdmans, 2004) by Henry H. Mitchell and Black Religion and Black Radicalism: An Interpretation of the Religious History of African Americans (3d ed. rev. and enlarged. Maryknoll, N.Y.: Orbis Books, 1998) by Gayraud S. Wilmore offer riveting information on the African American religious experience. E. Franklin Frazier and C. Eric Lincoln’s The Negro Church in America: The Black Church Since Frazier (New York: Schocken Books, 1974) is an important sociological study that offers the comparative perspectives of two important scholars of the black church. C. Eric Lincoln and Lawrence H. Mamiya’s The Black Church in the African-American Experience (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1990) covers theoretical and historical issues as well as providing in-depth denominational histories and useful statistical data. Peter J. Paris’s The Social Teaching of the Black Churches (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1985) is a very good source for more detailed discussion of the ways that the black church, as a social institution, has participated in African American culture. African American Religious Studies: An Interdisciplinary Anthology edited by Gayraud S. Wilmore (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1989) offers both a wide range of readings in the subject of African American religion and an introduction to many important scholars in the field.

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See also African Methodist Episcopal Church; African Methodist Episcopal Zion Churches; Baptist Church; Black Christian Nationalist Movement; Black nationalism; Church bombings; Church burnings; Civil Rights movement; Free African Society

Black codes Definition: Post-Civil War state laws limiting the rights of newly freed African Americans The black codes served to take away many of the freedoms that former slaves hoped to enjoy. The months immediately following the end of the U.S. Civil War were a period of great uncertainty. Wartime president Abraham Lincoln had been assassinated, and his successor, Andrew Johnson, was wholly untested. No leadership could be expected from Capitol Hill, since Congress had gone into a long recess. In the southern states, a host of questions required immediate answers; foremost among these were questions relating to the place of the recently freed slaves in postwar southern society. Would the freed slaves continue to furnish an economical and reliable labor force for southern cotton planters? Would the former slaves exact subtle or blatant revenge upon their former masters? Should lawmakers grant African Americans the vote in the southern states? Should the U.S. government give them land? Should the states pay the cost of a basic education for them? What legal rights would these five million African Americans enjoy in the postbellum South? Reconstruction Plans President Johnson developed a lenient plan for Reconstruction, one that called on the southern states to quickly reorganize their state governments. His only major demands of these new governments were that they admit that no state had the right to leave the Union, and that they ratify the Thirteenth Amendment, which ended slavery. As the new southern state legislatures began to meet, their exclusively white members were most inter-

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ested in passing laws that would answer some of the nagging questions about the future place of African Americans in southern society. Many legislators believed the freed slaves would not work unless forced to do so, and they feared the double specter of an economy without a labor supply and a huge mass of people who would live on charity or plunder. In earlier years, laws known as the “slave codes” had controlled the African American population; some lawmakers now called for a renewal of the slave codes to control the freed black population. Mississippi’s legislature was the first to take up the question of the rights of, or limitations on, African Americans. This body met in October, 1865, and quickly fell into arguments over what policies on racial matters should be enacted. Nearly half of the legislators favored laws that would, in almost every way, return African Americans to the position they had occupied in the time of slavery. Mississippi’s governor, Benjamin G. Humphreys, intervened and urged lawmakers to ensure certain basic rights to the newly freed slaves. After Humphreys’ intervention, the moderates in the Mississippi legislature had the upper hand and, on November 24, 1865, enacted a bill entitled “An Act to Confer Civil Rights on Freedmen.” As its title promised, Mississippi’s new law did confer some basic rights on African Americans that they had not enjoyed as slaves. These rights included the right to sue and be sued, the right to swear out criminal complaints against others, the right to purchase or inherit land, the right to marry, and the right to draw up labor or other contracts. Although the law’s title did speak of conferring civil rights, and a few new rights were indeed granted, this law—the first of the black codes of the southern states—was remarkable primarily for the rights it denied to African Americans. It did give African Americans the right to own land, but it denied them the right to rent rural land—thus the legislators sought to perpetuate large gangs of landless agricultural workers. The act recognized the right to marry, but it also provided that interracial marriage would be punished by life imprisonment for both parties. The right to testify in court was eroded by certain provisions that said the right to testify did not apply to cases in which both parties in a lawsuit or criminal case were

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white, nor to criminal cases in which the defendant was African American. Labor Provisions Most ominous was the provision that every black citizen in the state must sign a one-year labor contract by January 1 of each year and must honor that contract. Should the employee leave the employer before the end of the year, law enforcement officers were empowered to return the worker forcibly to his or her place of employment. In a provision reminiscent of the old laws that forbade giving help to runaway slaves, this new law made it a crime to give food, clothing, or shelter to any African American worker who had left his or her employer while still under contract. The punishment for helping a runaway was up to two months in jail; for those who helped the fugitive find work in a state other than Mississippi, the punishment was up to six months in jail. Once again, securing a stable labor supply for the state was at the forefront of lawmakers’ goals. After Mississippi passed this first black code, a flood of other laws soon followed in Mississippi and the other southern states. South Carolina’s black codes forbade African Americans from pursuing any occupation other than agricultural work, unless the worker paid a prohibitively expensive fee. Black farmworkers there were required by law to work from sunup to sundown and forbidden from leaving the plantation without the permission of their employer. South Carolina and Mississippi both enacted severe vagrancy laws that called for the arrest of idle persons, drunkards, gamblers, wanderers, fighters, people who wasted their pay, circus hands, actors, and even jugglers. If these persons were African American, they were to be considered vagrants and fined up to one hundred dollars and imprisoned. If unable to pay their fine, their labor would be auctioned off to a white employer, and their wages used to satisfy the fine. Differences Among the States The black codes varied from state to state, but their northern opponents said they all had the common goal of returning the freed slaves to a system equivalent to bondage. In some southern

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states, African Americans were prohibited from owning guns. In other states, their assembly in groups was forbidden, or an evening curfew was imposed. President Johnson, himself a southerner, saw little objectionable in the black codes, but many northerners did. Occupying generals Daniel E. Sickles in South Carolina and Alfred H. Terry in Virginia overturned all or parts of the black codes in their areas, pending action in Congress. In Washington, Senator Lyman Trumbull wrote the Civil Rights Act of 1866, which declared that all persons born in the United States were U.S. citizens, and that all U.S. citizens enjoyed equality before the law. Congress passed this measure over the veto of President Johnson. By 1868, the Fourteenth Amendment brought this same promise of equality before the law into the Constitution itself. The black codes were barely enforced. Overturned by the actions of occupying generals, and later by the U.S. courts, which found them in conflict with the Fourteenth Amendment, they were important chiefly for fueling a conflict in Washington between Johnson’s lenient Reconstruction plan and Congress’s insistence that the basic rights of African Americans be protected. These codes are also important for their role in bringing about passage of the Fourteenth Amendment. Although African Americans’ rights generally were protected between 1866 and 1876, the southern states found many ways to draft laws that were colorblind on their face, but that could be enforced in a racially biased way. After Reconstruction, few southern elected officials, and few officeholders nationwide, were very interested in championing African American civil rights. Stephen Cresswell Further Reading Cohen, William. “Negro Involuntary Servitude in the South, 18651940: A Preliminary Analysis.” Journal of Southern History 42 (February, 1976): 35-50. Discusses the larger picture of black labor and its lack of freedoms, linking the black codes to peonage and to the South’s convict labor system. Foner, Eric. Reconstruction: America’s Unfinished Revolution. New York: Harper & Row, 1988. This massive volume is the basic

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history of Reconstruction; chapter 5 covers the black codes and related events. Harris, William C. Presidential Reconstruction in Mississippi. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1967. Discusses the drafting of Mississippi’s black codes, which are especially important because they were a model for other southern state legislatures. Litwack, Leon F. Been in the Storm So Long: The Aftermath of Slavery. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1979. Tells the Reconstruction story as much through the eyes of the freed slaves as from the point of view of white government officials. Wallenstein, Peter. Blue Laws and Black Codes: Conflict, Courts, and Change in Twentieth-Century Virginia. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2004. Wilson, Theodore B. The Black Codes of the South. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1965. The only book exclusively devoted to the black codes. Provides thoughtful analysis of the meaning of these laws in southern and African American history. See also Civil Rights Act of 1866; Civil Rights Acts of 1866-1875; Civil Rights cases; Compromise of 1877; Disfranchisement laws in Mississippi; Fourteenth Amendment; Freedmen’s Bureau; Jim Crow laws; Ku Klux Klan; Plessy v. Ferguson; Reconstruction; Segregation

Black colleges and universities Definition: Historic institutions of higher education that have targeted African American students Black colleges and universities have been a major education vehicle for African Americans, allowing them to become credentialed to interact with others at work and socially and have enhanced intergroup understanding and relations. Lincoln University in Lincoln, Pennsylvania, established by Presbyterians in 1854, is the oldest black institution of its kind still

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in existence, and Wilberforce University in Ohio, established by Methodists two years later, is the second oldest. Both facilities have remained in their original locations. However, the first separate educational facilities for African Americans were private African schools established by free blacks after the Revolutionary War. Like later black colleges and universities, the early schools provided a strong sense of black identity as well as a way in which students could prepare for employment. Work opportunities, however, were often limited to manual labor or two professions that the larger society felt were less threatening: the ministry and teaching. New Institutions Many private and public historically black colleges and universities were established during the post-Civil War era and became the primary means by which African Americans could obtain a higher education in a society that restricted them from attending white institutions, either by law or by social norms. When they were created, many of these colleges were called “universities” or “colleges” but were actually secondary-school-level institutions. When studies that led to the professions of minister and teacher were incorporated into their curricula, these institutions rose to a post-high-school level. In most cases, the post-Civil War historically black colleges and universities included a theological purpose for all students: the instilling of what were considered Christian values. By the early part of the twentieth century, American philanthropic organizations had started to help support black colleges and universities through financial gifts. In the North and West, these gifts were not considered problematic, but in the South, many whites insisted that fiscal support go to institutions that emphasized vocational and industrial training. Two major black academics of that era, Booker T. Washington of Tuskegee Institute in Alabama and W. E. B. Du Bois of Atlanta University in Georgia, debated the type of education that African Americans, especially in the South, should receive. Washington emphasized the need for vocational and industrial training, while Du Bois focused on education that would

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lead to the professions. By the 1930’s, however, the debate was moot: Most historically black colleges and universities had developed into full-fledged colleges that required a high school diploma for entrance, and many were increasing graduate studies. These developments began to be supported in the 1940’s with the establishment of the United Negro College Fund, which pooled the fiscal resources of financially fragile private institutions. By the end of the twentieth century, enrollment at black colleges and universities had increased to its highest levels, which demonstrates that they retained their appeal to African Americans. Demographics Historically black colleges and universities are predominantly black academic institutions established before 1964 whose main purpose has historically been the educating of African Americans. Each must be state authorized to provide either a junior col-

Founded by the federal government in 1867, Howard University became one of the most prestigious black colleges in the nation. (Library of Congress)

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lege education or a four-year bachelor’s degree, and each must be accredited by an association recognized by the U.S. Department of Education or show progress toward achieving that accreditation. There were 109 historically black colleges and universities in 1995. Fifty of these, or 46 percent of the total, were public institutions, and the remainder were private institutions. They were located in fourteen southern states, three northern states, and three midwestern states plus the District of Columbia and the U.S. Virgin Islands. The institutions offered more than 450 academic programs in the liberal arts, sciences, education, business administration, social work, law, medicine, dentistry, engineering, military science, theology, and other fields. Most of the institutions offered associate or bachelor’s degrees. Thirty-eight of the schools offered master’s degrees, and twelve offered doctorate degrees. Some offered professional degrees. Enrollments in black colleges and universities represented about 3 percent of total higher educational institution enrollments in the United States in the mid-1990’s. Black enrollments increased from the 1960’s to 1980, decreased from 1981 to 1986, and then increased in the late 1980’s and the 1990’s. Generally, black male enrollment has slightly decreased over these periods, while black female enrollment has increased significantly. Historically black colleges and universities welcome nonblack students. In 1976, white enrollment in these institutions was more than 18,000; by 1989, this had increased to more than 26,000. Some institutions in gateway cities, such as Florida Memorial College in Miami, have had as much as one-third of their total student enrollments come from Hispanic communities. The majority of faculty and staff at these institutions are black, and the remainder are white, Latino, and nonblack foreign nationals. Although the institutions enroll just 20 percent of all African American undergraduates, they produce 30 percent of those who graduate. Impact American higher education has always been pluralistic; certain institutions were created primarily to serve students of a particular gender, race, ethnicity, or religion. Black colleges and uni-

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versities fit this national pattern, even though their histories and original needs may have differed. The impact of these institutions on the African American communities of the United States has been significant: Many of the local and regional African American leaders—ministers, educators, politicians, businesspeople, writers, artists—throughout the latter part of the nineteenth and the entire twentieth century have been graduates of black colleges. One of the more famous graduates is civil rights leader Martin Luther King, Jr. Black colleges and universities, first established from necessity, have continued to be prominent in American educational life because they have a purpose that appeals to their majority clientele, the encouragement and credentialing of an ethnically aware population. At historically black colleges and universities, many black students thrive academically in an environment they consider supportive and socially acceptable. William Osborne Max C. E. Orezzoli Further Reading Two valuable resources on African American institutions of higher learning are Black Colleges: New Perspectives on Policy and Practice (Westport, Conn.: Praeger, 2004) edited by M. Christopher Brown II and Kassie Freeman and Stand and Prosper: Private Black Colleges and Their Students (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2001) by Henry N. Drewry and Humphrey Doermann in collaboration with Susan H. Anderson. Historically Black Colleges and Universities: Their Place in American Higher Education, by Julian Roebuck and Komanduri Murty (Westport, Conn.: Praeger, 1993), includes very specific data from studies of race relations among students on both black and white campuses. A fine, older anthology that considers many issues faced by black educational institutions is Black Colleges in America: Challenge, Development, Survival, edited by Charles Willie and Ronald Edmonds (New York: Teachers College Press, 1978). Many scholars have contributed to this volume, which includes discussions of the self-concept of the colleges, the role of the graduate, the interaction of black college faculty and students, and teaching in key

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areas of the sciences and humanities. The United Negro College Fund has edited studies of black colleges and universities that provide continuing statistics and changing data, such as B. Quarles’s “History of Black Education,” in United Negro College Fund Archives: A Guide and Index to the Microfiche (New York: University Microfilms, 1985). The American Council on Education’s Office of Minority Concerns publishes Minorities in Higher Education: Annual Reports (Washington, D.C., various years), an annual document full of data and statistics. See also Atlanta Compromise; Education; School desegregation; Talented Tenth; United Negro College Fund

Black flight Definition: Population shift from urban to suburban areas Urban flight is often thought of as occurring primarily among whites. However, middle-class African Americans have also been leaving cities for suburbs, often settling in primarily black suburbs. In the decades following World War II, the United States became an increasingly suburban nation as Americans left cities for suburbs. During the 1940’s, the federal government began guaranteeing mortgage loans in order to encourage Americans to become homeowners. These mortgage guarantees went primarily to those buying homes in the suburbs, and they frequently underwrote home ownership in neighborhoods that intentionally excluded African Americans. At the same time, the growing use of private automobiles and the construction of the freeway network encouraged movement to the suburbs. As white Americans became more suburban, African Americans became more urban. Early in the twentieth century, the African American population had been primarily rural. As agriculture became more mechanized, African Americans moved to urban areas. Black concentration in cities, like white concentration in suburbs, was encouraged by the federal government. The federal Public Housing Authority established public housing

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largely in central city areas and restricted residence in public housing to the most economically disadvantaged. Because African Americans were proportionately much more likely to be poor than whites were, the availability of public housing in cities combined with housing discrimination in the suburbs to bring black Americans into urban areas. “White Flight” By the 1970’s, white movement from the cities to the suburbs had become known as “white flight.” Many observers of current events believed that whites were fleeing the cities to get away from African Americans. The racial integration of schools, and especially the busing of children to achieve racial integration, may have contributed to the movement of whites out of the cities, although social scientists continue to debate this point. Whites, however, were not the only ones to move to the suburbs. After the 1960’s, the middle-class African American population grew rapidly, and suburban housing became more widely available for them. During the 1970’s, the African American suburban population of the United States grew at an annual rate of 4 percent, while the white suburban population grew at a rate of only 1.5 percent. African American movement to the suburbs, labeled “black flight” by some social scientists, continued throughout the 1980’s and 1990’s. It was driven by many of the same factors that had been driving “white flight”: the concentration of the poor in central city areas, the deteriorating condition of urban neighborhoods and schools, and the availability of suburban housing. Black movement to the suburbs did not, however, lead to fully integrated neighborhoods across the United States. Instead, as authors Douglas S. Massey and Nancy A. Denton maintained in their influential book, American Apartheid (1993), African Americans tended to move into majority black suburban neighborhoods. Thus, “black flight” further concentrated minority poverty in the inner city by removing the middle class from inner city neighborhoods, while largely failing to integrate the American suburbs. Carl L. Bankston III

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See also Demographic trends; Economic trends; Employment; Great Migration

Black Is Beautiful movement Identification: Movement which supported the study of African customs and history and celebrated the uniqueness of African American culture Date: Mid-1960’s-1970’s Part of a broader drive to change political, economic, and social conditions for African Americans, the Black Is Beautiful movement emphasized the importance of countering stereotyped representations. The Black Is Beautiful movement, part of a broader drive to change political, economic, and social conditions for African Americans, emphasized the importance of countering stereotyped representations. Originating in the Black Power movement of 1965-1975, the phrase “black is beautiful” appealed to large segments of the black community not directly involved with movement organizations. Music and visual arts were central to this appeal: James Brown’s “Say It Loud, I’m Black and I’m Proud” and Aretha Franklin’s “Respect” signified the change in spirit from earlier integrationist phrases of the movement. Movement theorists, including Kwanza founder Ron (Maulana) Karenga, declared the necessity of an art connected with the African American community and committed to its well-being and proposed that black art should “praise the people” as well as “expose the enemy” and “support the revolution.” The Black Is Beautiful movement initiated sustained investigations of African traditions and history and celebrated the distinctiveness of African American culture. The success of evocations of “soul” in black music, food, speech, physical beauty, body language, and clothing inspired the creation of independent presses and bookstores and student demands for African American studies departments. Though the Black Power movement lost most of its impetus by 1975, the Black Is Beautiful ethos

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exerts a continuing influence on the struggles for multicultural, feminist, and homosexual self-definition. Trudi D. Witonsky See also African Liberation Day; Afrocentrism; Black nationalism; Black Power movement; Pan-Africanism; Stereotypes

Black Jews Identification: African Americans who adhere to Judaism There are no firm statistics for the number of African American Jews in the United States. In its broadest sense the term “black Jews” includes all persons of African descent in the United States who claim to practice Judaism. Not all such African Americans call themselves Jews; believing that the word “Jew” implies whiteness, some prefer to label themselves “black Hebrews” or “Israelites.” There are no authoritative figures on the number of black Jews in the United States. Estimates during the 1990’s ranged from as few as 40,000 to as many as 500,000, but those estimates did not reveal how the numbers were established. One scholar, using the narrow definition of Jewishness accepted by Orthodox rabbis, put the number at no more than 5,000. Accounts were occasionally printed in the nineteenth century of individual African Americans who attended Jewish congregational services, some of whom were said to have formally converted to Judaism. Not until the twentieth century were there reports of black Jewish congregations in the northern part of the United States. These were small synagogues or temples founded by African Americans and led by self-proclaimed black “rabbis.” Many were trained and “ordained” by Wentworth Arthur Matthew, who founded the Commandment Keepers Ethiopian Hebrew Congregation in Harlem, New York, in 1919. Matthew was inspired by Marcus Garvey’s Back-to-Africa movement and its celebration of the superiority of African civilization. Rejecting Christianity as a religion imposed on slaves by whites, he claimed

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to be reconstructing a proud African Jewish heritage, taken away from African Americans during slavery, that traced its roots through Ethiopia to the Jews of the Bible. Matthew was convinced that the ancient Hebrews were a black people, a belief also held by black Jews who asserted that they were descended from the lost tribes of Israel. Religious Practices Practices among black Jewish groups vary enormously. Congregations following the example of Rabbi Matthew attempt to observe Orthodox ritual traditions, though they might add their own dress and musical or liturgical forms. They eat only kosher foods, hold services on Fridays and Saturdays, and celebrate Jewish holidays, especially the Passover festival, which has particular resonance for African Americans. Others include Christian elements and symbols in their services. Some who call themselves black Hebrews or Israelites try to reconstruct the primitive Judeo-Christianity of the first century, asserting that Jesus is the Messiah of the Jews but rejecting most Christian theology. Whether trying to reclaim a mythical African past or hoping to establish a new identity, African Americans were not welcomed by most white Jewish congregations. Some did become fully accepted members of regular Orthodox, Conservative, or Reform synagogues if they satisfied the Orthodox definition of Jewishness by being a child of a Jewish mother. Other African Americans became Jews through formal conversions, often entered into because they were a partner in a mixed marriage. With few exceptions, black synagogues and leaders have not been accepted as legitimate by the formal religious or secular American Jewish community nor been admitted into national denominational groups or local rabbinical councils. Most black groups have never applied for such membership, and those that have applied have had their applications ignored. Few black leaders have ever received official rabbinic ordination, although all heads of black synagogues call themselves rabbis, using their title in its original meaning, that of teacher. Milton Berman

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Further Reading Chireau, Yvonne, and Nathaniel Deutsch, eds. Black Zion: African American Religious Encounters with Judaism. New York: Oxford University Press, 2000. See also Crown Heights conflicts; Jews and African Americans

“Black Manifesto” The Event: Call by militant black leaders for white Christian churches and Jewish synagogues to pay reparations to African Americans for the hardships of slavery Date: April 26, 1969 Place: Detroit, Michigan The initial reaction to the demands of the “Black Manifesto” was positive with promises of support coming from several denominations and groups, but soon the religious press across the spectrum attacked the manifesto and its strategies. The “Black Manifesto” was presented by Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) member James Forman to the National Black Economic Development Conference in Detroit, Michigan, and was adopted on April 26, 1969. The manifesto was a call to arms for African Americans to overthrow the current U.S. government, which it characterized as capitalist, racist, and imperialist, and to set up a black-led socialist government. The “Black Manifesto” demanded the payment of $500,000,000 in reparations to African Americans by white churches and Jewish synagogues to compensate for the hardships of slavery. Churches were specifically targeted because they were seen as agents of U.S. imperialism. The monies that were demanded in the manifesto were to be used to establish land banks, television studios, universities, and black presses. To pressure churches to pay the reparations, the manifesto advocated the disruption of church services and the seizure of church property. The initial reaction to the demands of the “Black Manifesto” was positive with promises of support coming from several de-

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nominations and groups, but soon the religious press across the spectrum attacked the manifesto and its methods, which echoed Malcolm X’s “by any means necessary” revolutionary strategies. The manifesto particularly alienated Jewish groups. C. A. Wolski Further Reading For more information about the manifesto and its impact, see Black Manifesto: Religion, Racism, and Reparations (1969), edited by Robert S. Lecky and H. Elliott Wright. See also Crown Heights conflicts; Nation of Islam; Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee

Black nationalism Definition: Identity movement that emphasizes the distinctiveness of black heritage and culture Black nationalism is a revitalization movement that seeks to empower black communities so that they direct their own futures and have more control over their relations with other racial and ethnic groups. Black nationalism, a historical movement that dates back to the sixteenth century, first appeared as protests by enslaved Africans who were being transported to the Americas and continued in the form of organized slave revolts that lasted until the Emancipation Proclamation. These protests could be termed nationalistic because the participants attempted to reclaim historic identities and rejected the power that whites had over them. One of the earliest, best-organized black nationalist movements was started by Paul Cuffe between 1811 and 1815. Cuffe was a black sea captain who transported several dozen black Americans to Africa in an attempt to establish a colony in Sierra Leone. Although black nationalism took various forms in the history of the United States, African Americans who emphasized their identity and power have always existed.

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The International Aspect Black nationalism has been most explicitly expressed and most broadly studied in the United States, but the movement is not limited to one nation. Black nationalists have asserted their distinctiveness and attempted to achieve self-empowerment in many postcolonial countries in the world, including Caribbean basin nations such as Jamaica, the Bahamas, Trinidad and Tobago, and, earlier in history, Haiti. Nationalistic feelings not only helped black people in these nations rid themselves of the European powers that had colonized them but also continue to affirm their distinctiveness. Black nationalist organizations have been active in Brazil, South Africa, and western Europe, particularly Great Britain. Many of the movements outside the United States have influenced African Americans, and American black nationalists have had an effect on black people in other countries, especially during the latter half of the twentieth century. Black Nationalist Leaders Throughout U.S. history, the black nationalist movement has been led by members of the clergy. In slave eras, some religious leaders would sing black spirituals that often had a political and social meaning in addition to their theological intent. Some of these songs, such as “Steal Away to Jesus,” were used to gather plantation slaves who would escape to freedom. In postslave eras, African American ministers often became the major organizers of nationalistic movements because they were the primary leaders of black communities. In their sermons, ministers often drew analogies between the enslaved people of Israel in the Old Testament and disfranchised African Americans. Some black theologians such as Joseph Washington have suggested that black churches functioned as political organizations whose main goal was freedom from white oppression. In the early twentieth century, African American sociologist W. E. B. Du Bois advocated a dual-consciousness for African Americans that emphasized their distinctiveness while recognizing them as Americans. Eventually Du Bois became disenchanted with the limitations on black status in the United States and explicitly promoted a Pan-African movement that would coordinate freedom movements between

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African Americans and Africa. Toward the end of his life, he considered Africa the national homeland for all black peoples and encouraged them to migrate there. Marcus Garvey, a West Indian who had immigrated to the United States, was the creator of the largest mass movement of nationalistic black people in the history of the nation. Under the auspices of his Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA), millions of African Americans were recruited to one of the institutions and businesses he set up as alternatives to whitedominated facilities. These included black capitalist enterprises such as restaurants, grocery stores, hotels, and entertainment centers and a steamship line that served to transport black Americans wishing to migrate to Africa. Most important, he also established the African Orthodox Church, a religious denomination that symbolized the highest values of a people seeking freedom and empowerment. White hostility and organizational mismanagement diminished the UNIA’s influence, but Garvey had demonstrated how separate institutions could help African Americans maintain their group identity and be empowered to express it. Contemporary Black Nationalism Many black movements followed in Garvey’s footsteps, but one, in particular, has been successful in continuing parts of his legacy while rejecting any notion of moving back to Africa. The Nation of Islam, whose members are sometimes called Black Muslims, flourished under the leadership of Elijah Muhammad between the 1930’s and the 1960’s, reaching a peak membership of more than 100,000. The group’s membership, however, does not reflect the many African Americans who did not join the organization but admired its tenets. The Nation of Islam shared Garvey’s insistence that African Americans have their own separate organizations in a white-dominated nation and claimed that the black nation in the United States had a right to be an independent nation with its own land. The Nation of Islam claimed that black people were the original people of creation and, therefore, the pure race. Black people were to remain separate from nonblacks because interacting with nonblacks could only make them less pure. The Nation of Islam emphasizes the central role of the man in the fam-

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ily, the importance of economic self-sufficiency, the necessity to abstain from degrading habits such as alcohol, drugs, and casual sex, and the worship of Allah, the creator. Their institutions are primarily mosques and religious houses of teaching and worship, but they also have agricultural areas in the South, small businesses in the North, and some educational facilities such as elementary schools in their headquarters, Chicago, Illinois. The death of Elijah Muhammad and the division of his organization into several groups has not diminished the influence of some of his followers. Louis Farrakhan, the leader of the most important of these groups, has expanded membership, accepted some Latinos and members of other minorities into the Nation, and correlated the Nation of Islam’s agenda with non-Muslim organizations including black Christian churches and black community-based political groups. The Impact of Black Nationalism The two major debates among black nationalists in the United States center on whether African Americans need to return to Africa or at least live separately and on what kind of alliances they should form with other organizations and people. Many people question whether a group can be seriously nationalistic without going back to Africa or establishing a separate territory within a previously white-dominated country. Malcolm X, who was Elijah Muhammad’s primary spokesperson while he was a member of the Nation of Islam, first believed in setting up a separate nation within United States boundaries but later perceived nationalism as a commitment and act that did not require geographical separation. Huey P. Newton and Bobby Seale, cofounders of the nationalistic Black Panther Party for Self-Defense, interpreted existing African American communities as unofficial black “places” that should be allowed self-determination and the expression of racial pride. Farrakhan has played down the notion of a separate land and instead emphasized the idea of separate thought. The second debate involves how closely black nationalists should ally themselves with either blacks who are not nationalistic or nonblacks. Malcolm X’s organization, founded after he left the Nation of Is-

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Poster issued by the Black Panther Party in support of its cofounder Bobby Seale when he was being tried for conspiracy to riot in 1968. (Library of Congress)

lam, Newton’s Black Panther Party, and even Farrakhan’s organization have worked with nonblacks, and all three have interacted with African American Christian clergy, who remain important black community spokespersons and organizers. In the 1960’s, when the U.S. Congress passed a series of desegregation laws, some people believed it would result in the demise of black nationalism. However, because the legal changes did not substantially affect discriminatory customs and attitudes, and African Americans remained the object of subtler forms of racism in their economic, political, and social lives, nationalism survived and grew. African Americans, even if they do not belong to a black nationalistic organization, continue to feel nationalistic pride and to attempt to empower themselves. As long as the United States is not a racially blind nation, it is likely that black nationalistic thinking and acts will affect American life. Black communal pride and black self-determination, the marks of identity and revitalization movements, remain relevant as long as the social implications of black “inferiority” persist. William Osborne Max C. E. Orezzoli

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Further Reading Rod Bush’s We Are Not What We Seem: Black Nationalism and Class Struggle in the American Century (New York: New York University Press, 1999) is an important work in the study of this movement. Modern Black Nationalism: From Marcus Garvey to Louis Farrakhan (New York: New York University Press, 1997), an exceptional anthology, relates the major black power era leaders’ ideas and discusses contemporary movements through the 1990’s. The major academic proponent of black nationalism, W. E. B. Du Bois, traces his own evolving thinking and contradicts some of his earlier social ideas in Dusk of Dawn: An Essay Toward an Autobiography of a Race Concept (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1940). For interviews of major figures of the movement, see The Negro Protest: James Baldwin, Malcolm X, Martin Luther King Talk with Kenneth B. Clark, edited by Kenneth B. Clark (Boston: Beacon Press, 1963). An incisive interpretation of the changes in Malcolm X’s life and thought appear in George Breitman’s Last Year of Malcolm X: The Evolution of a Revolutionary (New York: Merit Publishers, 1967). One of the most important historical works on the Nation of Islam is C. Eric Lincoln’s The Black Muslims in America (Boston: Beacon Press, 1961). The Black Panther Party’s minister of information, Eldridge Cleaver, wrote the twentieth century classic autobiography evidencing black identity problems called Soul on Ice (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1968). See also African Liberation Day; Afrocentrism; Black Christian Nationalist Movement; Black church; Black Is Beautiful movement; Black Panther Party; Black Power movement; Congressional Black Caucus; Million Man March; Nation of Islam; PanAfricanism; Universal Negro Improvement Association

Black Panther Party Identification: African American revolutionary organization often seen as the “vanguard” of the radical movement in the late 1960’s Date: Founded in October, 1966 Place: Oakland, California

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The Black Panthers captured the imagination of both disaffected youth and the media by combining an urban paramilitary style with a program dedicated to “serving the people.” Founded in early October, 1966, at an antipoverty community center in North Oakland, California, the Black Panther Party for SelfDefense was the brainchild of Huey P. Newton, community organizer, law student, and street tough. Newton and the party’s cofounder, Bobby G. Seale, an army veteran, sheetmetal worker, and aspiring comedian who also worked at the community center, had been active in black nationalist circles while they were students at Oakland’s Merritt College during the early 1960’s. Born in the South, they came of age in the urban ghetto, and although they were inspired by the Civil Rights movement, it was Malcolm X, not Martin Luther King, Jr., who fired their imaginations. After years of frustration with college-based African American militants who paid insufficient attention to Newton’s “brothers on the block” and especially in the wake of the massive Watts riot in Los Angeles, which Newton and Seale saw as the beginning of a new era, the two formed their own organization dedicated to armed self-defense among the African American masses. The idea for the name of the organization came from a Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) project in Alabama that was spearheaded by Stokely Carmichael. This project, the Lowndes County Freedom Organization, used a black panther as its symbol. “The panther is a fierce animal,” Newton explained later, “but he will not attack until he is backed into a corner; then he will strike out.” Other groups also took the name, in Harlem and San Francisco in 1966 and in Los Angeles the following year, but only the Oakland group survived. Black Panther membership, at the height of the group’s activity in the late 1960’s, is disputed; estimates range from the high hundreds to the low thousands. By 1969, the group had chapters in most major northern cities and an international division. Party Ideology Part of the reason for the party’s success in the late 1960’s— and for its failure in the 1970’s—may have been the nature and

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evolution of its ideology, which quickly proved to be classconscious rather than race conscious. Newton and Seale drew eclectically from foreign revolutionaries and domestic militants in fashioning a program of black liberation predicated on the legitimacy of violence: They had read Mao Zedong, Frantz Fanon, and Che Guevara, who endorsed armed revolution; they were also familiar with the writings and activities of Robert F. Williams in North Carolina, the Deacons for Defense and Justice in Louisiana, and Malcolm X, all of whom advocated armed self-defense. However, as Newton explained in 1970, the Panthers became Marxist-Leninists who embraced dialectical materialism, which in four short years took them from black nationalism (liberation of the black “colony” in the United States), to revolutionary nationalism (nationalism plus socialism), to internationalism (solidarity with the oppressed peoples of the world), and finally to

This official propaganda poster of the Black Panther Party employs two of the organization’s primary symbols: a gun and a book. (Library of Congress)

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“intercommunalism” (world revolution pitting oppressed communities against the U.S. “empire”). Newton later claimed to have undergone a slow transformation from black nationalism to socialism while he was in college in the early 1960’s, based on his “life plus independent reading.” Therefore, the party’s original program called for full employment (“if the white American businessman will not give full employment, then the means of production should be taken from the businessmen and placed in the community”), decent housing (“if the white landlord will not give decent housing to our black community, then the housing and the land should be made into cooperatives”), an end to police brutality, exemption from military service, and release of all African Americans from prison. Activities Though one of their first campaigns was to force the city of Oakland to erect a traffic light at a dangerous intersection, initially the Panthers’ political work consisted mainly of confronting law enforcement officials (whom they called an “occupying army”), especially while “patrolling the police.” The activity involved groups of armed Panthers observing interactions between local residents and the police, advising the residents of their rights and, as a result, often engaging in tense confrontations with the officers. This direct attempt to confront white authority in the black community, which Newton later claimed was a way of exhausting all legal means to protect African Americans’ rights in anticipation of revolutionary activity, was an enormous leap in the history of African American resistance in the United States. However, in the summer of 1967 when the California assembly passed legislation curbing the carrying of firearms, a bill aimed at the Panthers, the group stopped the patrols and dropped “for Self-Defense” from its name. As Black Panther chapters multiplied throughout the country, however, physical confrontations grew, with deaths on both sides. At the same time, the Panthers established what they called “survival programs,” beginning with free breakfasts for schoolchildren and expanding into areas such as medical care, clothing, and education.

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Before the California gun-control law was passed, Newton sent some thirty armed Panthers to protest at the state capitol in Sacramento. This dramatic demonstration generated some national publicity, but what set the stage for the Panthers’ dramatic growth occurred early one morning in October, 1967, when the Oakland police stopped Newton after he had spent the night celebrating the end of his probation for assault. Gunfire followed, and the Panther leader was wounded, as was one policeman; another patrolman, Officer John Frey, died. Newton was charged with Frey’s murder and faced possible execution. Charismatic exconvict and writer Eldridge Cleaver, who edited the party newspaper, The Black Panther, and became its minister of information in 1967, orchestrated a national “Free Huey” campaign that made Newton a virtual icon. Newton’s celebrated 1968 trial ended in a manslaughter conviction, and the campaign to free him succeeded in 1970 when the conviction was overturned on appeal. Although these events earned for the Panthers national recognition, they also brought the attention of the authorities. The ensuing raids, prosecutions, and the promotion of internal dissension by the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) wrecked the Black Panther Party. By 1970, much of the national and even regional leadership had gone underground or was awaiting trial, in jail, or in exile. Impact FBI director J. Edgar Hoover called the Black Panther Party the “greatest threat to the internal security of the country,” and the U.S. government viewed them as a serious danger; however, the Panthers were more often ridiculed. According to Allen J. Matusow in his 1984 book, The Unraveling of America: A History of Liberalism in the 1960’s, in one influential survey of the 1960’s, the Panthers are described as a “handful of blacks with a mimeograph machine” who “existed mainly in the demented minds of white leftists.” The group did attract the support of the leading militant African Americans, SNCC leaders Carmichael, H. Rap Brown, and James Forman, and even managed a short-lived alliance of sorts (the Panthers called it a “merger”) with SNCC in 1968. In early 1969, the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS)—

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at its height but soon to be destroyed by internal factionalism— endorsed the Panthers as the vanguard of the revolution in the United States. The Panthers also provided the model for other groups such as the Brown Berets, the Young Lords, the White Panther Party, the Red Guards, and the Gray Panthers; the group’s ten-point platform and program (What We Want, What We Believe) became the blueprint for other 1960’s groups. Finally, the Panthers changed the popular lexicon; for example, they introduced the epithet “pig,” in reference primarily to police officers but also to government officials, and the rich. Subsequent Events Especially damaging was the public and bloody falling-out between Newton and Cleaver in early 1971, the climax of two years of internal splits and purges. The rift with Cleaver was a product of Newton’s attempt to direct the group away from militant confrontation and to community organizing through the survival programs it had developed. Newton’s continued run-ins with the law, however, resulted in his fleeing to Cuba, where he stayed from 1973 to 1977. The Black Panthers lived on in his absence and, after his return, remained a viable organization into the early 1980’s, but it never regained its role as a leading revolutionary group. Jama Lazerow Further Reading Liberation, Imagination, and the Black Panther Party: A New Look at the Panthers and Their Legacy (New York: Routledge, 2001) edited by Kathleen Cleaver and George Katsiaficas and The Black Panther Party (Reconsidered) edited by Charles E. Jones (Baltimore: Black Classic Press, 1998) both provide valuable insights into the Black Panther Party. Off the Pigs! (1976), edited by G. Louis Heath, provides a long historical introduction (based mostly on government sources and FBI informants), a sampling of primary documents, and an extensive bibliography. The Black Panthers Speak (1970), edited by Philip S. Foner, offers a good collection of writings and speeches. Important Panther autobiographies and memoirs include Seale’s Seize the Time (1970) and Newton’s Revolu-

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tionary Suicide (1973). A sympathetic journalistic account can be found in Michael Newton’s Bitter Grain (1980); a particularly negative treatment is presented in Hugh Pearson’s The Shadow of the Panther (1994). See also Black nationalism; Black Power movement; Black United Students; Hampton-Clark deaths; Republic of New Africa; Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee

Black Power movement Definition: Ideological shift away from integrationism and nonviolence and toward a radical black nationalism This new way of thinking strongly influenced a wide range of movements and organizations in the 1960’s. Black nationalism as a tool for social, economic, and psychological empowerment has a long history, as seen, for instance, in the writings of Marcus Garvey (social activist and civil rights leader in the 1920’s and 1930’s) and Malcolm X (spokesperson for the Nation of Islam). After the February, 1965, assassination of Malcolm X, some civil rights activists turned toward a revolutionary nationalist philosophy that urged aggressive tactics and separatism and the abandonment of civil disobedience, legal cases, and other more reformist strategies. The first use of “black power” as a slogan was during a 1966 march to Jackson, Mississippi, following the shooting of James H. Meredith, the first African American student to attend the University of Mississippi. Some in the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) felt nonviolent interracial action was ineffective and that SNCC should become an all-black organization. On June 16, several marchers were arrested and jailed in Greenwood, Mississippi, including SNCC chair Stokely Carmichael, who told supporters after he was released: “I ain’t going to jail no more. What we gonna start saying now is ‘black power.’” At the urging of SNCC activist Willie Ricks, who yelled, “What do you want? Black power!,” the crowd of supporters picked up

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the chant. After national news coverage of Carmichael’s release, the slogan rapidly spread across the nation. The actual concept of black power remained contested and imprecise, although it divided the Civil Rights movement. Less radical organizations such as the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People and Martin Luther King, Jr.’s Southern Christian Leadership Conference opposed black power, while SNCC and the Congress of Racial Equality backed it. By the late 1960’s, black power advocates were a diverse group that included businesspeople who used black power to push black capitalism, the paramilitary revolutionaries of the Black Panther Party who sought an end to capitalism, and the cultural nationalists of Ron Karenga’s US organization. The advent of black power paralleled a geographic shift for the Civil Rights movement: In contrast to the nonviolent church-based southern civil rights struggle of the 1950’s and early 1960’s, African American “rebellions” had exploded in dozens of northern and western cities in 1964-1965, areas where civil rights organizing would continue through the late 1960’s and 1970’s.

Stokely Carmichael (center, pointing), the head of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, amid a demonstration in protest of Congress’s attempts to deny Harlem representative Adam Clayton Powell his seat in 1967. (Library of Congress)

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Impact Black power resulted in greater racial pride and self-esteem for some African Americans. It also brought the interracialism of the early Civil Rights movement to a close, leading some white activists to shift their work to white communities and other causes. Others viewed black power as merely defiant symbolism that did not achieve real structural change. Nevertheless, its influence was widespread, spurring the creation of black studies programs in universities, the founding of the League of Revolutionary Black Workers within the labor movement, and the growth in the numbers of African Americans elected as representatives. Puerto Ricans, Chicanos, and Native American activists (who coined the phrase “red power” during the Alcatraz Island occupation), often stated that they were inspired by black power. The extensive Federal Bureau of Investigation infiltration of black nationalist groups and subsequent state repression directed at these groups along with internal divisions (often along the lines of cultural versus revolutionary nationalism) led to the decline of many black power organizations by the mid-1970’s. Black nationalism continued in various forms, including the popularity of Afrocentrism in the 1990’s. Vanessa Tait Further Reading Jeffrey O. G. Ogbar’s Black Power: Radical Politics and African American Identity (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2004) is an informative analysis of the Black Power movement. Manning Marable’s Race, Reform, and Rebellion: The Second Reconstruction in Black America (1991) chronicles the complex political transformations during the black power period. Clayborne Carson’s In Struggle: SNCC and the Black Awakening of the 1960’s (1981) examines how black power shaped a key civil rights organization. A documentary history of black power from 1791 to the late 1960’s can be found in The Black Power Revolt: A Collection of Essays (1968), edited by Floyd Barbour. See also Black Christian Nationalist Movement; Black Is Beautiful movement; Black nationalism; Black Panther Party; Civil

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Rights movement; Congress of Racial Equality; Malcolm X assassination; Nation of Islam; Pan-Africanism; Republic of New Africa; Southern Christian Leadership Conference; Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee

Black United Students Identification: Militant organization of African American college students Date: Founded during the late 1960’s These students, spurred by the Black Power movement, worked toward establishing black studies departments in colleges and universities. In the latter half of the 1960’s, African American college students, inspired by the Black Power movement, formed collectives in colleges and universities throughout the United States in order to improve the lives of African American students and institute black studies departments. The first record of students organizing as the Black United Students was at San Francisco State University in 1968. The group was organized by Professor Nathan Hare, who later denied his part in the student strike, and supported by the Third World Liberation Front, a coalition of minority groups. In November, 1968, the Black United Students, with the encouragement of the Black Panther Party, called for a student strike at San Francisco State University. The group presented the campus administration with fifteen nonnegotiable demands relating to the creation of a black studies department and the improvement of black student life. In response to the students’ protest, San Francisco State University created the first integrated black studies program in 1969. Previously, Meritt Junior College in nearby Oakland, California, had begun offering a few courses in black studies, primarily to appease some members of the Black Panther Party, such as Huey P. Newton, who were attending the junior college, but it did not create a complete black studies department. In addition to their efforts toward establishing black studies departments, the Black United Students actively joined with

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other campus groups in antiwar, antiestablishment protests in the late 1960’s and early 1970’s. The most noteworthy of these protests occurred in 1970, when the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) and the Black United Students cosponsored a demonstration at Kent State University in Ohio, where four young people were killed by the Ohio National Guard. Impact The efforts of the Black United Students and similar African American groups helped establish black studies departments in numerous colleges and universities in the late 1960’s and the following decades. By the 1990’s, approximately two hundred black studies programs had been created across the nation. These programs have evolved from the original 1960’s programs, which were sometimes cursory and not very well thought out, into degree-granting, three-tiered programs. At the first level, these programs provide an introduction to African history and to the African experience in the Americas and in other parts of the world. At the second level, they begin to include more specific courses and examine current issues and research, delving into issues such as the place of African Americans in American society. At the third level, the programs offer an integrated look at African influences on and experiences of psychology, economics, political science, sociology, history, and literature. In the late 1990’s, a number of organizations calling themselves the Black United Students were located on campuses across the United States. These organizations act to further the interests of African American students. Annita Marie Ward Further Reading Turmoil on the Campus (1970), edited by Edward J. Barder, discusses various issues raised by African American students in the 1960’s. See also Black Panther Party; Civil Rights movement; Education; Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee

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Bleeding Kansas The Event: Territorial warfare between free-soil and proslavery factions in Kansas Date: Mid-1850’s Place: Kansas The issues in the Bleeding Kansas conflict presaged the national Civil War. With the opening of Kansas Territory to settlement in 1854 through the Kansas-Nebraska Act, a contest began between groups supporting slavery (mainly persons from Missouri) and settlers from the northwestern states who were Free-Soilers in practice, if not ideology. The Missourians seized control of the territorial government and immediately enacted proslavery legislation. President Franklin Pierce and his successor, James Buchanan of Pennsylvania, accepted the proslavery Kansas government and committed the Democratic Party to the admission of Kansas as a slave state. By September, 1855, enough Free-Soilers had entered the state to enable them to repudiate the territorial legislature, organize a Free State Party, and call for a constitutional convention to meet in Topeka. A free-state constitution was written in October and November, 1855, and in January, 1856, the party elected a governor and legislature. Kansas found itself with two governments— one supporting slavery and considered legal by the Democratic administration in Washington but resting upon a small minority of the population, and the other representing majority opinion in Kansas but condemned as an act of rebellion by President Pierce and Senator Stephen A. Douglas of Illinois. Douglas, who had drafted the Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854, favored the theory of popular sovereignty, letting the people decide the issue of slavery. That doctrine, however, was exposed—eventually by Abraham Lincoln in the Lincoln-Douglas debates—as unconstitutional: The will of the people could not be held above constitutionally protected rights. Violence Begins Although proslave and free-soil groups moved into Kansas, actual bloodshed remained at a minimum through 1855; never-

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theless, the territory quickly came to symbolize the sectional dispute. Violence became commonplace in Kansas through the spring and summer of 1856. Armed free-soil and proslavery parties skirmished along the Wakarusa River south of Lawrence as early as December, 1855; but it was the sack of Lawrence in May, 1856, by a large band of proslavery Border Ruffians from Missouri, that ignited the conflict. Retaliation was demanded: John Brown, the abolitionist crusader, his four sons, and three others struck at Pottawatomie, where they executed five settlers who were reputed to be proslavers. That act of terrorism sparked further retaliation. Early in August, free-soil forces captured the slavery stronghold of Franklin; later that month, Free-Soilers, led by Brown, repelled an attack by a large party of proslavers at Osawatomie. Guerrilla warfare raged throughout the territory until September, when a temporary armistice was achieved by the arrival of federal troops and a new territorial governor, John W. Geary. However, a solution to the travail of Kansas could come only from Washington, D.C., and it would have to overcome the determination of the Democratic administration and its southern supporters to bring Kansas into the Union as a slave state. Meeting at Lecompton in January and February, 1857, the proslave territorial legislature called for an election of delegates to a constitutional convention. The measure passed over Governor Geary’s veto. Lecompton Constitution The constitutional convention that met in Lecompton in September, 1857, hammered out a document to the electorate; the proslavery leadership would agree only to submit the document to the people with the choice of accepting it with or without the clause explicitly guaranteeing slavery. However, ample protection for slavery was woven into the fabric of the constitution. Opponents refused to go to the polls, and the proslavery Lecompton Constitution was approved in December, 1857. The Free-Soil Party, meanwhile, had captured control of the territorial legislature and had successfully requested the new territorial governor, Frederick P. Stanton, to convene the legislature

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in order to call for another election. On January 4, 1858, the Lecompton Constitution met overwhelming defeat. Kansas was, by that time, free-soil in sentiment, but the Buchanan administration supported the Lecompton Constitution, which became a test of Democratic Party loyalty. Although Douglas came out against the administration’s position, the Senate voted in March, 1858, to admit Kansas under the Lecompton Constitution. Public sentiment in the North opposed such a policy, and the House of Representatives voted to admit Kansas as a state only on the condition that the state constitution be submitted in its entirety to the voters at a carefully controlled election. That proviso was rejected by the Senate. A House-Senate conference proposed the English Bill, a compromise measure that stipulated that the Lecompton Constitution should be submitted to the people of Kansas again: If the bill were approved, the new state would receive a federal land grant; if it were rejected, statehood would be postponed until the population of the territory reached ninety-three thousand. Although Congress passed the bill in May, the voters of Kansas rejected the Lecompton Constitution again, this time by a margin of six to one. In January, 1861, after several southern states announced secession, Kansas entered the Union as a free state under the Wyandotte Constitution. John G. Clark Updated by Larry Schweikart Further Reading Two valuable works on this era in history are Nicole Etcheson’s Bleeding Kansas: Contested Liberty in the Civil War Era (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2004) and Thomas Goodrich’s War to the Knife: Bleeding Kansas, 1854-1861 (Mechanicsburg, Pa.: Stackpole Books, 1998). Roy F. Nichols’s The Disruption of American Democracy (New York: Macmillan, 1948) is a traditional, yet effective, analysis of the 1850’s, emphasizing the destruction of the Democrats as the national party. William E. Gienapp’s The Origins of the Republican Party, 1852-1856 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987) emphasizes the rise of the Republican Party as the crucial element in ending the earlier U.S. party

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system. Argues that the formation of the Republican Party represented a realignment that started with the demise of the Whigs, continued with the rise of the Know-Nothings, and culminated with the events in Kansas that galvanized the disparate elements. See also Civil War; Compromise of 1850; Fugitive Slave Law of 1793; Fugitive Slave Law of 1850; Harpers Ferry raid; KansasNebraska Act; Missouri Compromise; Proslavery argument

Bolling v. Sharpe The Case: U.S. Supreme Court ruling on school desegregation Date: May 17, 1954 This case had major theoretical implications, for it indicated that the Supreme Court continued to interpret the due process clauses as protecting substantive rights as well as procedures. In Bolling v. Sharpe, a companion case to Brown v. Board of Education, the issue of segregated public schools in the nation’s capital, a matter of congressional jurisdiction, was treated in an opinion separate from Brown because the Fourteenth Amendment did not apply to the federal government and because the applicable Fifth Amendment did not include an equal protection clause. From the perspective of practical politics, it would have been highly embarrassing for the Court to allow segregated schools in Washington, D.C., while ruling them unconstitutional in the rest of the country. Speaking for a unanimous Supreme Court, Chief Justice Earl Warren first noted that the petitioners were African American minors who had been refused admission to a public school “solely because of their race.” He then declared that the Court had long recognized that certain forms of governmental discrimination violated the constitutional mandate for due process of law. For precedents, he looked to an 1896 dictum by Joseph M. Harlan and to Buchanan v. Warley, a 1917 decision that had defended the equal right of citizens to own property based on a substantive due process reading of the Fourteenth Amend-

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ment. Also, Warren referred to obiter dicta in the Japanese American cases that acknowledged that racial classifications were inherently suspect, requiring that they be “scrutinized with particular care.” Warren gave an expansive interpretation of the “liberty” protected by the Fifth Amendment, explaining that it extended to the “full range of conduct which the individual is free to pursue.” The government could restrict liberty only when justified by a “proper governmental objective,” and racial segregation in education was not related to such an objective. Thus, the Washington, D.C., schools were imposing an “arbitrary deprivation” on the liberty of black children. In addition, Warren noted that it was “unthinkable” that the federal government might practice the kind of discrimination prohibited in the states. Bolling v. Sharpe had major theoretical implications, for the case indicated that the Supreme Court continued to interpret the due process clauses as protecting substantive rights as well as procedures, although the substantive focus had shifted from property interests to liberty interests. Also, the decision affirmed that the ideas of liberty and equality are often overlapping and that constitutional due process of law prohibits government from practicing invidious discrimination. Thomas Tandy Lewis See also Brown v. Board of Education; Buchanan v. Warley; Little Rock school desegregation crisis; School desegregation; Segregation

Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters Identification: Labor union of predominantly African American railroad workers Date: Founded in 1925 This union won the wage and work-hour concessions it was demanding, thus becoming the first African American labor union to sign an agreement with a major U.S. corporation.

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Poster for a 1930’s production of Eugene O’Neill’s 1920 play, The Emperor Jones, about an American sleeping car porter who goes to a Caribbean island, where he makes himself a dictatorial ruler. (Library of Congress)

A small group of men gathered in 1925 and organized the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters in an effort to improve the Pullman Company’s treatment of African American employees. Since the 1860’s, black porters had been providing personalized service to rail passengers traveling in the finely furnished sleeping cars first introduced by George Pullman. Pullman cars, as they were known, were comparable to the nation’s most luxurious hotels. The porters carried luggage, provided room service, made beds, and cleaned the cars. Despite their many duties, the porters were paid exceptionally low wages. In the summer of 1925, with assistance from magazine publisher A. Philip Randolph, leaders of the New York branch of Pullman porters met to organize a union, the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters. For twelve years, the union struggled to reach a compromise with the Pullman Company, nearly abandoning the effort on several occasions. Finally in 1937, the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters won the wage and work-hour concessions it was demanding, thus becoming the first African American labor union to sign an agreement with a major U.S. corporation. Donald C. Simmons, Jr.

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Further Reading Bates, Beth Tompkins. Pullman Porters and the Rise of Protest Politics in Black America, 1925-1945. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001. Tye, Larry. Rising from the Rails: Pullman Porters and the Making of the Black Middle Class. New York: Henry Holt, 2004. See also Defense industry desegregation; Economic trends; Employment; Fair Employment Practices Committee; National Association for the Advancement of Colored People

Brown v. Board of Education The Case: Landmark U.S. Supreme Court ruling on school desegregation Date: May 17, 1954 The Supreme Court unanimously held that de jure (legally mandated) segregation of the public schools was prohibited by the equal protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. Following the Civil War (1861-1865), racial segregation in public accommodations and education—through so-called “Jim Crow” laws—was one of the major tools of the southern states for maintaining a social system of white supremacy. In Plessy v. Ferguson (1896), the Supreme Court allowed state-mandated racial segregation based on the separate but equal doctrine. In Cumming v. Richmond County Board of Education (1899), the Court simply ignored the equal part of the doctrine when it allowed a community to maintain a public high school for white students without any similar institution for African Americans. In Gong Lum v. Rice (1927), the Court explicitly recognized the “right and power” of the states to require segregation in the public schools. The Challenge Begins In the 1930’s the Legal Defense and Educational Fund of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) began to mount a serious challenge to the constitution-

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ality of Jim Crow laws in education. Rather than confronting Plessy directly, the NAACP first concentrated on equality of opportunity at publicly funded law schools. Decisions such as Missouri ex rel. Gaines v. Canada (1938) and Sweatt v. Painter (1950) indicated that the Court would insist on substantial equality of educational opportunity. In McLaurin v. Oklahoma State Regents for Higher Education (1950), the Court recognized that the policy of required separation was sometimes relevant to educational equality. With these victories, Thurgood Marshall and other NAACP lawyers decided that the time was ripe to question the constitutionality of segregation in elementary and secondary education. Linda Carol Brown, an eight-year-old African American girl, was not allowed to attend the all-white school in her neighborhood of Topeka, Kansas. Her parents did not want her to be bused to the all-black school, which was far from home, and they filed a suit charging a violation of the Fourteenth Amendment. When the case was appealed to the Supreme Court, it was consolidated with similar cases from South Carolina, Virginia, Delaware, and Washington, D.C. The cases were listed in alphabetical order, so that the name Brown v. Board of Education appeared first. The cases were first argued in December, 1952. Marshall and other NAACP lawyers emphasized the psychological and sociological evidence of negative effects from mandated segregation. In defense of segregation, the school districts invoked Plessy and claimed that their all-black schools either had or would soon have equal funding for facilities and teachers’ salaries. The Court’s Response Because of the great opposition to school integration in the South, the justices recognized the desirability of presenting a united front in both the decision and the opinion. At least six of the justices agreed that Plessy should be reversed, but they strongly disagreed about how rapidly to proceed. One justice, Stanley F. Reed, argued on behalf of the continuation of Plessy, and another justice, Robert H. Jackson, wanted to move very cautiously and appeared determined to write a concurring opinion if the majority opinion were too critical of the Court’s past approval of segregation. Deciding that it needed more information about

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the original intention of the framers and ratifiers of the Fourteenth Amendment, the Court scheduled a second argumentation of the cases for December, 1953. That summer, Chief Justice Fred M. Vinson, a moderate who was hesitant to order massive desegregation, unexpectedly died, and he was quickly replaced by the popular governor of California, Earl Warren. After Brown was reargued, Warren convinced his colleagues to defer the question of relief, and he skillfully consulted with the various justices in order to get a consensus. About a week before the decision was announced, Jackson decided not to issue a concurrence and Reed agreed not to dissent. Warren’s opinion for the Court, written in thirteen paragraphs of nontechnical language, declared that segregation in public education was “inherently unequal” and therefore unconstitutional. The public interpreted racial segregation of students “as denoting the inferiority of the Negro group,” generating among African Americans “a feeling of inferiority as to their status in the community that may affect their hearts and minds in a way unlikely ever to be undone.” Warren found that the historical evidence about the original intent of the Fourteenth Amendment was “inconclusive.” Even if the framers and ratifiers had not intended to prohibit segregation in education, they had wanted to provide equal rights for public services, and the experiences of the twentieth century demonstrated that segregated schools were incompatible with the goal of equality. Formal education in the twentieth century, moreover, was much more important for a person’s life chances than it had been when the Fourteenth Amendment was written. Implementing Desegregation The following year, in a decision commonly called Brown II, the Court addressed the issue of implementing desegregation. The NAACP wanted to proceed rapidly with firm deadlines, and the states warned that rapid desegregation would lead to withdrawal from the public schools and acts of violence. The Court settled on a cautious and ambiguous formula, requiring that segregation end “with all deliberate speed.” The implementation of Brown II, which left much discretion to federal district judges,

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proceeded somewhat slowly for the first ten years. In Alexander v. Holmes County (1969), the Court abandoned the deliberate speed formula and ordered an immediate end to all remaining de jure segregation. Brown is probably the most momentous and influential civil rights case of the twentieth century. In effect, the decision meant the eventual elimination of all state-sanctioned segregation. When Brown was announced, its implications were unclear in regard to the constitutionality of freedom of choice plans and de facto segregated schools based on housing patterns. The Court began to move beyond the issue of de jure segregation in Green v. County School Board of New Kent County (1968), ruling that previously segregated school districts had an “affirmative duty” to take the steps necessary to promote racially integrated schools. Thomas Tandy Lewis Further Reading Bell, Derrick. Silent Covenants: “Brown v. Board of Education” and the Unfulfilled Hopes for Racial Reform. New York: Oxford University Press, 2004. Clotfelter, Charles T. After “Brown”: The Rise and Retreat of School Desegregation. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2004. Kluger, Richard. Simple Justice: The History of “Brown v. Board of Education” and Black America’s Struggle for Equality. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1976. Martin, Waldo. “Brown v. Board of Education”: A Brief History with Documents. Boston: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 1998. Ogletree, Charles J., Jr. All Deliberate Speed: Reflections on the First Half Century of “Brown v. Board of Education.” New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 2004. Patterson, James T. “Brown v. Board of Education”: A Civil Rights Milestone and Its Troubled Legacy. New York: Oxford University Press, 2001. Sarat, Austin, ed. Race, Law, and Culture: Reflections on “Brown v. Board of Education.” New York: Oxford University Press, 1997. Whitman, Mark, ed. Removing a Badge of Slavery: The Record of “Brown v. Board of Education.” Princeton, N.J.: Markus Wiener, 1993.

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See also Alexander v. Holmes County Board of Education; Bolling v. Sharpe; Civil Rights movement and children; Cooper v. Aaron; Cumming v. Richmond County Board of Education; Education; Fourteenth Amendment; Green v. County School Board of New Kent County; Keyes v. Denver School District No. 1; Little Rock school desegregation crisis; McLaurin v. Oklahoma State Regents for Higher Education; Milliken v. Bradley; National Association for the Advancement of Colored People; Plessy v. Ferguson; School desegregation; Separate but equal doctrine; Southern Manifesto; Swann v. Charlotte-Mecklenberg Board of Education; Sweatt v. Painter; White Citizens’ Councils

Brown v. Mississippi The Case: U.S. Supreme Court ruling on coerced confessions and defendants’ rights Date: February 17, 1936 The Supreme Court held that the due process clause of the Fourteenth Amendment prohibited states from using criminal confessions obtained by means “revolting to the sense of justice.” In the early 1930’s, three African American tenant farmers in Mississippi were convicted of murdering a white planter. The main evidence was their confessions. At trial, police officers admitted that they had employed brutal whippings and threats of death to obtain the confessions. The defendants, nevertheless, were convicted and sentenced to be hanged. The Mississippi supreme court upheld the constitutionality of their trials and convictions. By a 9-0 vote, the Supreme Court reversed the state court’s ruling. Chief Justice Charles Evans Hughes’s opinion held that coerced confessions violated a principle “so rooted in the traditions and conscience of our people as to be ranked as fundamental.” At the same time, however, the Court reaffirmed that the self-incrimination clause of the Fifth Amendment was not binding on the states. Despite its modest requirements, Brown was the first in a line of cases requiring fundamental fairness for the use of confessions in state trials. Thomas Tandy Lewis

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See also Edmonson v. Leesville Concrete Company; Fourteenth Amendment; Moore v. Dempsey; Norris v. Alabama

Brownsville incident The Event: Shooting incident that was unfairly blamed on a contingent of African American soldiers Date: August 13, 1906 Place: Brownsville, Texas The Brownsville incident illustrated the strong currents of racism that ran through early twentieth century America and the presumptions white Americans had about black behavior and the rights of African Americans in the military. The case was also one of the most serious lapses in the public record of President Theodore Roosevelt and a graphic example of the limits of his tolerance for black Americans during his presidency. On August 13, 1906, a shooting incident occurred in Brownsville, Texas. White residents of the border town blamed a detachment of African American soldiers that had recently been stationed at nearby Fort Brown. According to local police reports, one person was killed and another wounded. Suspicion immediately fell on the black soldiers, and the officials in the U.S. Army concluded that the African American soldiers had been responsible for the incident. Physical evidence, however, showed that they had not been involved and the most probable explanation for the episode was that white citizens had staged the event to discredit the soldiers. The soldiers denied any knowledge of what had taken place. The Army and President Theodore Roosevelt concluded that the men of the Twenty-fifth Infantry Regiment had been responsible for the shooting. Their failure to reveal what had taken place and their protestations of innocence were, in the minds of their white superior officials, proof of their guilt. The president ordered that all 167 black soldiers in the regiment should be dismissed from military service without trial and without pay. Shortly after the congressional elections of 1906, the soldiers were compelled to leave the Army.

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The weakness of the government’s case against the soldiers attracted the attention of conservative Republican senator Joseph B. Foraker of Ohio, who became a staunch defender of the soldiers and pressed for congressional probes into what had really happened. His opposition to Roosevelt on other issues had caused a rupture in his friendship with the president. Their disagreement over the Brownsville incident intensified their quarrel, and they clashed in public about the controversy in January, 1907. Roosevelt remained adamant that the accused men were guilty and used the full powers of the federal government to buttress his case. The War Department even hired private investigators to find damaging evidence against the soldiers, largely without success. Despite congressional efforts to reduce the penalties that the black soldiers had suffered, these efforts produced few lasting results. Protests by African American groups in the North also failed to sway Roosevelt from his first hasty judgment about the men’s guilt. Foraker left Congress in 1909 still convinced of the men’s innocence. The issue gradually faded from history and did not resurface until 1970, when John D. Weaver published The Brownsville Raid. His vigorous argument for the innocence of the men and the miscarriage of justice that they had suffered attracted public attention. Congressional pressure led the army to grant the men of the regiment honorable discharges more than six decades after their dismissal. Two aged surviving veterans of the unit received public recognition of what they had endured. Lewis L. Gould Further Reading Weaver, John D. The Brownsville Raid. Foreword by Lewis L. Gould. College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 1992. ____________. The Senator and the Sharecropper’s Son: Exoneration of the Brownsville Soldiers. College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 1997. See also Buffalo soldiers; Military; Tuskegee Airmen; Tuskegee experiment

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Buchanan v. Warley The Case: U.S. Supreme Court ruling on housing discrimination Date: November 5, 1917 Emphasizing property rights, the Supreme Court struck down state laws that mandated racial segregation in housing. Early in the twentieth century, many southern cities enacted ordinances that mandated residential segregation. Louisville, Kentucky, prohibited both African Americans and European Americans from living on blocks where the majority of residents were persons of the other race. The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People arranged a sale of property to test the law. Although the Supreme Court had consistently sanctioned segregation, it ruled unanimously that the Louisville ordinance was unconstitutional. In his opinion for the Court, Justice William R. Day stated that the ordinance was an unreasonable restriction on the liberty of all people to buy and sell property, as protected by the due process clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. The decision showed that the protection of property rights and economic liberty could sometimes have the effect of promoting civil equality. The Buchanan decision, however, was of limited impact for two reasons. First, it did not question the constitutionality of de jure racial segregation in areas such as education and transportation. Second, many private citizens began to enter into racially restrictive contracts, which were not rendered unenforceable until Shelley v. Kraemer (1948). Thomas Tandy Lewis See also Bolling v. Sharpe; Patterson v. McLean Credit Union; Shelley v. Kraemer

Buffalo soldiers Definition: Respectful Indian nickname given to black soldiers in the U.S. Army during the nineteenth century

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Regiments of buffalo soldiers served on the western frontier from 1866 until 1898. They played instrumental roles in helping the United States defeat the Apaches, as well as Mexican outlaws led by Pancho Villa. In addition to protecting settlers, installing telegraph lines, and building roads, buffalo soldiers escorted wagon trains and stagecoaches, built forts, and found sources of drinkable water. The name was retained by black units in the twentieth century, and many buffalo soldiers earned Medals of Honor for their valiant service in the U.S. military. During early 1866, the first U.S. military units composed solely of African Americans, the Fifty-seventh and 125th United States Colored Infantry Regiments, were organized to provide protection for mainly white settlers in New Mexico. On July 28, 1866, the U.S. Congress approved the formation of six additional regiments of African American troops. The Ninth Cavalry regiment was activated on September 21, 1866 at Greenville, Louisiana. On the same day, the Tenth Cavalry regiment began duty at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas. Later in 1866, the Thirty-eighth, Thirtyninth, Fortieth, and Forty-first infantry units composed of African Americans were assembled. Enlistment periods were for five years, with salaries of thirteen dollars per month, along with room, board, and clothing. The members of these regiments fought many engagements against Plains Indians, who came to respect them greatly. Because the exceptional courage, dark skin, and curly hair of the African American soldiers resembled characteristics of the buffalo, the Indians dubbed members of the Ninth and Tenth Cavalry regiments “buffalo soldiers.” The soldiers themselves were proud of the respect that the name conveyed. Before long, the title was applied to all African American soldiers. The Ninth Cavalry served in Texas from 1867 until 1875, when they were transferred to the New Mexico District. There they participated in several military campaigns against the Apaches, who were led by such skilled leaders as Victorio, Geronimo, and the Apache Kid. After serving for over eight years in Kansas and present-day Oklahoma, the Tenth Cavalry opened more than 300 miles of new

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Troops of the 125th Colored Infantry Regiment on parade at Fort Randall in Dakota Territory. (Library of Congress)

roads and strung more than 200 miles of telegraph lines in Texas. In 1879-1880, the Tenth served in a key military campaign against Victorio and the Apaches whom the government regarded as “renegades.” During the Spanish-American War of 1898, buffalo soldiers fought in Cuba, and companies from the Ninth and Tenth Cavalries participated in Theodore Roosevelt’s famous charge on San Juan Hill. In 1899, members of the Ninth and Tenth served in the Philippines to help control the Filipino nationalists. Buffalo soldiers also served in later conflicts in Malaysia, China, and Japan. During World War I, buffalo soldiers patrolled the U.S.-Mexico border, while others served in the Philippines, Hawaii, and Europe. In 1941, the Ninth and Tenth Cavalry regiments were combined into the Fourth Cavalry Brigade, which was deactivated in 1944. During World War II, buffalo soldiers fought in Italy during the fall of Rome in 1944 and in breaking through the Gothic line in France in 1945.

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In 1948, U.S. armed forces were officially desegregated, and buffalo soldiers were transferred to integrated military units. Alvin K. Benson Further Reading Leckie, William H. The Buffalo Soldiers: A Narrative of the Black Cavalry in the West. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2003. Raabe, Emily. Buffalo Soldiers and the Western Frontier. Barrington, Ill.: Rigby, 2002. Stovall, Taressa. The Buffalo Soldiers. New York: Chelsea House Publishers, 1997. Willard, Tom. Wings of Honor. New York: Forge, 2000. See also Military; Military desegregation; Tuskegee Airmen; World War II

Burton v. Wilmington Parking Authority The Case: U.S. Supreme Court ruling on public accommodations Date: April 17, 1961 The Supreme Court held that a state agency may not lease public property to a private restaurant on terms inconsistent with the equal protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. In this case, the Supreme Court was asked to decide on the constitutionality of a segregated private restaurant located within a parking garage owned and operated by the city. William Burton, an African American, sued the city agency after he was denied service in the restaurant. By a 6-3 vote, the Court found that the city’s association with the restaurant was sufficient to make it a party to the discrimination in violation of the Fourteenth Amendment. Burton illustrates the willingness of the Court under Chief Justice Earl Warren to expand the definition of state action in support of the Civil Rights movement. The public/private distinction became much less important after the Civil Rights Law of

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1964 prohibited racial discrimination in private businesses open to the public. The doctrine of state action, nevertheless, continues to have significance in cases involving private clubs, as in Moose Lodge v. Irvis (1972). Thomas Tandy Lewis See also Moose Lodge v. Irvis; Segregation; Shelley v. Kraemer

Charleston race riots The Event: Fighting between white Republicans and black Democrats during the months leading up to a presidential election Date: September-November, 1876 Place: Charleston, South Carolina Political corruption and intimidation characterized both sides in the conflict. After the Civil War ended in 1865, South Carolina was controlled by northern-born whites and black southerners with support from the U.S. federal government. Southern whites who were allied with some black southerners attempted to regain control of the local government. By 1876, a tense atmosphere had developed between the two forces as a gubernatorial election approached between Republican Daniel H. Chamberlain, the incumbent and a Massachusetts-born former Union army officer, and Democrat Wade Hampton, a former slaveowner and Confederate lieutenant general. Political corruption and intimidation characterized both sides. On September 6, black Democrats rallied in Charleston to support Hampton. A group of black Republicans attacked the black Democrats and their white escorts, and a riot ensued. The riot lasted for several days with black Republicans destroying property and attacking whites. One black man and one white man died, and about one hundred people were injured. Tensions remained high until the election on November 7, and the next day, as people were awaiting the election results, gunfire erupted in Charleston. Black police officers loyal to the Republicans began

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firing at the rioters. One black man and one white man were killed, and about a dozen other people were injured. Federal troops intervened and restored order. Both candidates claimed victory in the election, but by 1877, power had returned to white Democrats because of a political deal with the Republican presidential candidate. Abraham D. Lavender See also Civil War; Colfax massacre; Draft riots; Reconstruction

Chicago riots The Event: Racially motivated civil disturbance Date: July 25-September 24, 1967 Place: Chicago, Illinois These riots combined with more extensive riots in more than thirty other U.S. cities during the summer, reflecting serious race relations problems throughout the United States. Many African Americans from the southern United States began migrating to Chicago in the early twentieth century. Racism and mostly unsuccessful competition with whites over jobs and housing persisted for decades. As the summer of 1967 began, about 800,000 African Americans, many feeling frustrated and hopeless, lived in the city’s crowded black ghettos. On Tuesday night, July 25, African American youths began looting, smashing car windows, and throwing firebombs on Chicago’s West Side. During the next week, vandalism, looting, and arson occurred on the South Side and the West Side. Police attributed the riots to reports of racial conflicts in other cities, and Mayor Richard Daley announced that live ammunition would be used against rioters. Police exchanged gunfire with youths firing from a building, and five Molotov cocktails were thrown into a store. About a hundred people were arrested. On August 1, an African American man was shot by a white man, and a firebomb was thrown. Fifty-two African Americans were arrested after they did not disperse, and more firebombs were thrown.

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On August 3, the Reverend Jesse Jackson requested that Chicago be declared a disaster area. The situation calmed down, but on August 26, shots were fired while a blaze was being fought in the South Side, and nine African American youths were arrested. On September 14, an African American power rally sponsored by the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) charged police with brutality and fascism, and window smashing, rock throwing at cars, and scattered sniper fire was reported. Police, aided by leaders of African American street gangs, calmed the area. The next day, African American students boycotted classes to protest inadequate school conditions. On September 22, in the suburb of Maywood, five hundred people pelted police cars with bottles because no African American students had been nominated for homecoming queen. Thirty people were arrested. The following day, after police shot and critically wounded a burglary suspect, about three hundred African Americans threw bricks and bottles through store windows, and police used tear gas. On September 24, ten African Americans and eleven whites were arrested in Maywood by police in an attempt to prevent a third night of violence. The Chicago riots were over for the summer of 1967. The riots of 1967 were largely responsible for President Lyndon B. Johnson’s appointing of the National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders on July 27, 1967. The commission issued a report referred to as the Kerner Commission Report after its chairman, Governor Otto Kerner of Illinois. Although the commission did not select Chicago for one of its in-depth investigations, the conditions described in the report were also found in Chicago, and the Chicago riots were part of the unrest that led to the report. Abraham D. Lavender Further Reading The Report of the National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders, published by the Government Printing Office in 1968, gives the best understanding of the Chicago riot; Bantam Book’s 1968 reprint of the report, entitled The Kerner Report, gives a good background.

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See also Chicago sit-ins; Kerner Commission; New York riots; Newark riot; Race riots of 1967; Race riots of the twentieth century; Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee; Washington, D.C., riots; Watts riot

Chicago sit-ins The Event: Earliest sit-in demonstrations Date: May-June, 1943 Place: Chicago, Illinois These demonstrations were intended to change the attitudes of business owners and thus differed from the sit-ins of the later Civil Rights movement era; however, they set important precedents for the later sit-in movement. Still in its first year when it launched the 1943 sit-ins in Chicago, the Congress of Racial Equity (CORE) had enthusiasm for nonviolent methods developed by Mohandas K. Gandhi in India’s struggle for independence but had little experience with those methods. The Chicago Committee of Racial Equality that developed into CORE was founded in 1942, chiefly by James Farmer, Bernice Fisher, Homer Jack, George M. Houser, Joe Guinn, and James R. Robinson, all students in Chicago. This biracial group was headed by Farmer, one of two African Americans among the major founders. Farmer was a theology student whose father was a professor at Wiley College in Texas, and he was deeply interested in Christian pacifism. As a staff member of the Fellowship of Reconciliation (FOR), like Houser, Farmer wanted to apply Gandhian and Christian ideals to society with a view toward creating harmony and mutual respect among all races and classes. This kind of social vision informed those who experimented with the sit-in technique in Chicago. In retrospect, Farmer has written, their early efforts there were idealistic. They hoped to change the minds of the restaurant owners and were “childishly literal-minded.” They were not insistent that they be given access to public facilities on the basis of law but tried to convince their resisters that access would be good for business.

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Preparations The 1943 sit-ins were months in the making. CORE’s earliest efforts to combat racial discrimination in Chicago were undertaken on a broad front: the university barber shop (which refused in November, 1942, to cut Bayard Rustin’s hair), the medical school and the hospital, even the roller rink. By the end of 1942, CORE’s attention was increasingly focused on restaurants that refused to serve African Americans. Two such restaurants were the Jack Spratt Restaurant near CORE Fellowship House and Stoner’s Restaurant, a downtown establishment in the Loop that served chiefly an upper-middle-class clientele. CORE first learned of racial discrimination at Stoner’s in October, 1942, when three of its members (one of them black) were refused service by the owner himself. During the following five months, CORE gathered information at these two restaurants, attempting to comply with the Gandhian strategy that called for careful investigation to determine whether there was undeniable evidence of discrimination before proceeding to direct action. Interracial test groups were sent both to Stoner’s and to Jack Spratt’s. Sometimes the groups were served, but after a long period of waiting. On some occasions, they were served food that was overly salted or laced with broken eggshells. By December, 1942, CORE was sufficiently convinced of discrimination to spend a full week distributing to customers leaflets that pointed out the evidence and asked customers to protest against it as they paid their bills. Some Chicago residents began to question CORE’s pressure on Stoner’s Restaurant, and as a result Houser and other CORE leaders decided to survey dozens of other Loop restaurants to determine whether Stoner’s policy was typical or an exception to prevailing practices. The study showed that virtually all Loop eating establishments operated on a nondiscriminatory basis. CORE published the results in a pamphlet entitled “50 Loop Restaurants That Do Not Discriminate.” CORE distributed this pamphlet to various groups, both white and black, and sent a copy to Stoner’s management. Further efforts to desegregate the restaurant by test groups failed, and by January, 1943, Houser, Farmer, and other CORE officials were debating the possibility of direct action.

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In March, 1943, CORE leaders considered staging what it called a sit-down, in which participants would occupy seats until served, at Stoner’s. They decided against it after considering the logistical difficulties involved in a small group’s efforts to gain meaningful attention in a two-hundred-seat restaurant. The project was delayed until June to coincide with CORE’s first national convention, which would bring several direct action groups into Chicago and thus provide enough people to increase the chances of success. In May, however, CORE led a smaller sitin operation at Jack Spratt’s. The sit-in at Jack Spratt’s involved twenty-one CORE members, most of them white. The group entered the restaurant at the dinner hour on May 14, 1943, and refused to eat until the African Americans among them were served. Police officers were called, but they found they could do nothing to disperse the participants in the sit-in. Within two hours, the management of Jack Spratt’s decided to serve all in the group, and in that sense the sit-in was a success. It was not clear whether such a demonstration would work at the larger Stoner’s Restaurant, but the experience at Jack Spratt’s encouraged CORE to follow through with the plans for a June sit-in there. The sit-in at Stoner’s Restaurant involved more than three times the number of participants. Some sixty-five people, sixteen of them African American, sat in at Stoner’s during the evening meal on Saturday, June 5. Around 4:30 p.m. white demonstration participants entered the restaurant in groups of two, three, and four. They were readily seated. When the first of the two interracial groups entered shortly after 5:00 p.m., the six African Americans and two whites were ignored when they requested seats. After a half-hour wait, they were taken to a table and served. Houser reported that one of the white participants was kicked in the leg by the restaurant owner as the group passed. As the first interracial group was seated, the second entered. Its nine African Americans and one white person were refused service and threatened, but they stood near the entrance for more than ninety minutes. The police were called three times but saw no cause for making arrests since the group was orderly.

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After the third call, the police officers instructed the restaurant owner not to call again unless there was a compelling reason. Encouraged by expressions of sympathy from some of the restaurant staff, the interracial group stood quietly, refusing to budge. Other customers in the restaurant expressed support, and several of the black employees threatened to quit if the group was not served. CORE members pledged to stay all night if necessary. Breaking the Impasse Eventually, the deadlock was broken when an elderly white woman who was not involved with CORE invited one of the black women in the group to sit at her table. The white CORE participants who were already seated followed her example and invited the unseated group to join them. When only two were left standing, one of the hostesses approached them and invited them to follow her to a small table at the center of the restaurant. With that, applause broke out across Stoner’s Restaurant. For several minutes, a spontaneous demonstration of support changed the tense atmosphere to one of relief. Impact The CORE-sponsored sit-ins of May and June, 1943, in Chicago, were less dramatic and received far less press coverage than the sit-ins of the early 1960’s. Their historic significance has, however, been recognized. Considered the first sit-in of the modern Civil Rights movement in the United States they served as examples for later sit-ins conducted by the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) and for the massive wave of sit-ins triggered by an incident at Woolworth’s lunch counter in Greensboro, North Carolina, in February, 1960. To the leaders of the 1943 sit-ins, the results were gratifying. Almost no violence resulted, and the response from white people who observed the demonstration was generally very supportive. CORE leader Houser considered it a “well executed nonviolent demonstration for racial justice.” The racial discrimination of Stoner’s Restaurant continued unevenly throughout the war

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years, but by 1946 interracial groups were served without resistance. For CORE, the experience confirmed the viability of the Gandhian methods to which it was committed. The Gandhian model called for investigation, early efforts at negotiation, firm expression of determination, personal spiritual preparation, and, if necessary, nonviolent direct action. CORE followed those steps meticulously in Chicago and was reinforced in its belief in the effectiveness of such an approach. James Farmer, the best known of the early CORE leaders, was convinced that the 1943 sit-ins strengthened CORE’s resolve and heightened its influence. The sit-in at Stoner’s coincided with CORE’s first national convention, bringing groups from nine cities together; out of this convention grew the beginnings of national organizational affiliation known collectively as the Congress of Racial Equality (1944). The broadened organization’s “Statement of Purpose and Action Discipline” clearly committed it to nonviolent direct action and the elimination of all racial discrimination and segregation. The Chicago experience was one of the specific examples of success to which the organization could point in future years and from which it could draw inspiration. CORE soon began to sponsor training workshops to promulgate the principles of nonviolence and to train people in its techniques. Regional organizational subdivisions linked the national office with local affiliated committees. In that way, CORE retained a democratic structure while offering guidance and personnel for various campaigns. The Chicago experience continued to provide a point of reference demonstrating that collective nonviolent action could produce results. Thomas R. Peake Further Reading Broderick, Francis L., and August Meier, eds. Negro Protest Thought in the Twentieth Century. Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1965. This compendium of major documents on African American protest efforts includes valuable information on the founding of CORE and its early nonviolent direct action campaigns. James Farmer’s philosophy of nonviolent social change is reflected,

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as are incidents at Stoner’s Restaurant that led to the first CORE sit-in in 1943. Contains vivid summaries of the historical setting and an index. Farmer, James. Freedom, When? New York: Random House, 1965. An insightful study by one of CORE’s principal founders. Farmer’s account is uniquely valuable for providing insight into the motivations, dreams, problems, and experiences of the mostly young activists who spearheaded racial desegregation in the United States. He describes conditions confronting African Americans before the Civil Rights movement of the 1960’s and analyzes his own and others’ goals, the emergence of black nationalism, and the continuing need for reform. Farmer avoids a sanguine or idealistic vision of the future, projecting instead a long struggle for freedom. Includes a table of contents. Hentoff, Nat. Peace Agitator. New York: Macmillan, 1963. A. J. Muste was a ubiquitous influence on pacifism, nonviolence, and social reform movements in the United States for several decades. The value of Hentoff’s study is its focus on Muste’s outreach in shaping people such as James Farmer and eventually Martin Luther King, Jr.—to the extent that Muste’s arguments against violence and war contributed to their nonviolent methods of social change. Scholarly in tone, the book is not documented but has numerous quotations and a detailed index. Houser, George M. Erasing the Color Line. 3d rev. ed. New York: Fellowship Publications, 1951. Originally published in 1945, this personal account by Houser complements those of Farmer and James Peck. Beginning with descriptions of the problems confronting African Americans, he presents specific analyses of challenges faced in restaurants, service shops, swimming pools, housing situations, and prisons. Houser also discusses discrimination in employment and ends with his views on nonviolence. His accounts of racial discrimination include many tangible examples of nonviolent protest. This short booklet lacks notes or bibliography, but it has a table of contents and frequent chapter subdivisions to guide the reader.

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Meier, August, and Elliott Rudwick. CORE: A Study in the Civil Rights Movement. New York: Oxford University Press, 1973. The most comprehensive and thoroughly researched of the books on CORE, this survey is a detailed account of its background, founding, and development. A scholarly book, it includes detailed references to primary and secondary material and analyzes objectively the successes and failures of CORE from its beginning in 1942 until the onset of its decline in the late 1960’s. It is especially valuable for noting the Gandhian philosophy and techniques of CORE from 1942 to the 1960’s. Contains elaborate notes, including a useful one on sources, and an index. Peck, James. Freedom Ride. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1962. Although chiefly about the 1947 “Journey of Reconciliation” and the 1961 freedom rides, Peck’s account is indispensable for an insider’s perspective on the nature and distinctive challenges of CORE’s early efforts to counter racism and segregation in the United States. Many accounts of jailings, beatings, and moments of hope and discouragement are included. His account is not scholarly in the conventional sense and contains no notes or bibliography. Schmeidler, Emilie. Shaping Ideas and Actions: CORE, SCLC, and SNCC in the Struggle for Equality, 1960-1966. Ann Arbor, Mich.: University Microfilms International, 1983. An analytical study focusing on three of the major activist organizations of the Civil Rights movement. Lacking in sufficient historical detail on specific campaigns, it nevertheless provides useful analyses of the protest models of CORE and other civil rights organizations and helps the reader understand their differences and similarities. CORE’s pre-1960 direct action campaign, including the Chicago sit-ins and the “Journey of Reconciliation,” are seen as important to the organization’s self-image and social effectiveness as a Gandhian direct action entity. Contains notes and table of contents. See also Chicago riots; Civil Rights movement; Congress of Racial Equality; Greensboro sit-ins; Sit-ins

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Chisholm’s election to Congress The Event: Election of the first black woman to the U.S. Congress Date: November 5, 1968 Place: New York, New York Shirley Chisholm was elected on a platform of opposition to all forms of discrimination and vigilant support for the interests of African Americans, women, children, Puerto Ricans, and members of other minorities. The political education of Shirley Chisholm began in the Seventeenth Assembly District (AD) Club of Brooklyn and continued in the Bedford-Stuyvesant Political League. Decorating cigar boxes used to hold raffle tickets was one of Chisholm’s first political jobs. Women did this work to raise money for the AD Club, but this work, according to Chisholm, was unsupported financially and unappreciated by the men of the club. She demanded money to pay the women and to cover the costs of supplies, tickets, and prizes, costs that the women had been paying. She got seven hundred dollars. In time, Chisholm became a member of the board of directors of the AD Club, and even though she was both a woman and African American, she became a vice president of the club while still in her twenties. Preparing for a Political Career Chisholm was introduced to Wesley McDonald (Mac) Holder during her senior year in college. Holder was to be the seminal political influence in Chisholm’s life. She described him as the “shrewdest, toughest, and hardest-working black political animal in Brooklyn.” In 1953, she joined Holder in a campaign to elect a black municipal court judge. The Bedford-Stuyvesant Political League grew out of that campaign. It was the Unity Club, of which she was a founding member, that was most important to her political future. Its goal was to gain political control of the Seventeenth District and end white rule there. Unity offered candidates for election in 1960, including its leader, Thomas R. Jones. Unity’s campaign attracted the support of both Eleanor Roosevelt and Harry Belafonte, but its candidates lost. In preparation

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for 1962, Unity expanded its membership, held voter registration drives, and conducted political education seminars. It petitioned for the appointment of more African Americans and Puerto Ricans to city jobs and called for better health care; improved housing, transportation, and lighting; integrated schools; and expanded youth services. It demanded that both African Americans and Puerto Ricans be granted political representation equal to their numbers. Jones was elected, thereby ending white political rule in Bedford-Stuyvesant in 1962. In 1964, Jones became a judge on the civil court in Brooklyn, opening the way for Chisholm to run for the New York legislature from the Seventeenth District with the support of Unity. With limited financial support, augmented by four thousand dollars of her own money, she won the Democratic nomination, then defeated Republican Charles Lewis, 18,151 to 1,893. She was neither the first black woman to seek office in Brooklyn—Maude B. Richardson had in 1946—nor the first black woman elected to the New York legislature—Bessie Buchanan had earlier represented Harlem. Chisholm’s election in 1964 was the year after the Supreme Court handed down its decision in Gray v. Sanders, “one person, one vote.” Reapportionment of districts that resulted from this decision aided in the election of eight African Americans to the New York legislature in 1964, six to the assembly and two to the senate. Chisholm maintained that her years in the assembly were productive despite the fact that she was a political maverick. Legislation she introduced created the Search for Evaluation, Education, and Knowledge (SEEK) program that enabled African American and Puerto Rican students without adequate academic training to enter the state universities. She proposed legislation to promote day-care centers and provide unemployment insurance for domestic workers. Another measure protected female school teachers from losing tenure as a result of interruptions in employment related to pregnancy. She strongly opposed the use of state money for church-run schools because it would erode support for public education. Another bill she proposed would have required police officers to complete successfully courses in civil rights, minority problems, and race relations. The

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Associated Press judged her to be one of the two most militant and effective black members of the assembly, along with Percy Sutton. Chisholm Campaigns for Congress Court-ordered reapportionment in 1968 created a new Twelfth District in Brooklyn. The new district was 80 percent Democratic and 70 percent black and Puerto Rican. Chisholm saw the district as ideal for her and announced her candidacy for Congress. Of eight AD leaders in the Twelfth District, only Thomas R. Fortune supported Chisholm; four supported William C. Thompson, an African American lawyer. Chisholm used that support to define Thompson as the candidate of the political bosses, adopting a campaign slogan of Fighting Shirley Chisholm—Unbought and Unbossed. The third candidate was Dollie Lowther Robinson, a lawyer and former labor leader and an official in the Kennedy administration’s Labor Department. A tenacious, outspoken campaigner, Chisholm enjoyed the support of the Unity Club and Mac Holder. With a sound truck, a caravan of cars, and a small army of volunteers, many of whom were women, she carried her campaign to the people—to housing projects, parks, churches, and even street corners. At each stop, Chisholm manned the sound truck while her volunteers fanned out in all directions, loaded with shopping bags stuffed with campaign literature. Her contact with Puerto Ricans was particularly effective because of her fluent Spanish (her college minor). The political pundits predicted a Thompson victory in the Democratic primary, but the votes provided by the United Club in Bedford-Stuyvesant produced a victory by almost eight hundred votes. After the primary, Chisholm faced the Republican candidate, James Farmer, who actually lived in Manhattan. Both candidates stressed jobs, housing, and education, and both opposed the Vietnam War. Farmer’s campaign suggested the need for a “strong male image” in Washington, an issue that unnecessarily raised the question of sex, in Chisholm’s estimate. Actually, as Holder discovered, the district had more than twice as many female as male voters, making the issue of sex a liability for

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Shirley Chisholm. (Library of Congress)

Farmer. Chisholm found discrimination against women in politics particularly unjust. “Of course we have to help black men,” she conceded, “but not at the expense of our own personalities as women. The black man must step forward, but that does not mean we have to step back.” Farmer failed to receive the support of the Brooklyn chapter of the Congress of Racial Equality. Some local Republicans, who resented the fact that he was an interloper, also withheld support. Furthermore, Farmer refused to support the Richard Nixon-Spiro Agnew presidential campaign (although he later accepted a position as assistant secretary of health, education, and welfare in the Nixon administration). Chisholm’s strongest support came from the Puerto Rican community. She beat Farmer 34,885 to 13,777, with Conservative candidate Ralph J. Carrane receiving 3,771 votes. After her election in 1968, she was returned to the House of Representatives, with majorities in excess of 80 percent, in every election through 1980.

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In the Ninety-first Congress, Chisholm requested a committee assignment consistent with her experience and education, preferably on the House Education and Labor Committee. Instead, she was appointed to the Agriculture Committee and its subcommittee on forestry and rural villages. She railed against the system as “petrified”; the seniority system, she said, should be called the “senility” system. Ultimately she took her case to the Democratic caucus. Even there, seniority prevailed and Chisholm was ignored. Finally, she simply walked down the aisle and stood in the well, waiting to be recognized. “For what purpose is the gentlewoman from New York standing in the well?” Wilbur Mills asked. Chisholm maintained that since there were only nine black congressmen (feminist terms such as “congresswoman” or “congressperson” were trivial in her opinion, especially given the problems of black women)—an underrepresentation relative to black population—the party was under a moral obligation to make the most effective use of them. Subsequently she was assigned to the Veterans’ Affairs Committee, and in the Ninetysecond Congress received appointment to the Education and Labor Committee. Congressional Service In her maiden speech in Congress, Chisholm responded to President Richard Nixon’s reduction of funding for Head Start, an education program, in order to fund the antiballistic missile (ABM) program. She vowed to vote against any funding bill for the Department of Defense that came up in the House until the administration rethought its “distorted, unreal scale of priorities.” Like the ABM program, however, the Vietnam War depleted national resources and energy needed to resolve domestic problems. The legacy of the Civil Rights movement of the 1960’s was little more than unenforced laws. More legislation was not the answer; proper enforcement was, she claimed. She was suspicious that integration was intent upon refashioning African Americans in the image of whites. The War on Poverty was a failure, too; it had been created by white middle-class intellectuals. She rejected the resort to violence that some militants advocated—even

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though she defined herself as a militant—because violence made African Americans victims of their own actions. The power structure of society resided with a few whites, she argued, so blacks, browns, yellows, reds, and even whites must unite in common cause, within the system, to secure justice. In 1971, Chisholm joined members of the Congressional Black Caucus in presenting sixty demands to President Nixon. Earlier they had formed a shadow cabinet to oversee federal enforcement of civil rights laws. They asked the president to commit himself unequivocally to the goal of equality for all Americans, as had the National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders appointed by President Lyndon B. Johnson in 1967. The government lacked both the will and the staff to address civil rights effectively and meaningfully, according to that commission’s report. The pervasiveness of white racism, chronic discrimination, and segregation in employment, education, and housing had appalling effects on the ghetto life of African Americans, particularly youths, men, and the hard-core disadvantaged. The conscience of the whole nation needed to be aroused to oppose racism against African Americans and sexism against women, Chisholm contended. Chisholm concluded that abortion had no relevancy to law, as no one should be forced to have or not have an abortion. She accepted the honorary presidency of the National Association for the Repeal of Abortion Laws, the goal of which was the repeal of all laws restricting abortion. She supported the Equal Rights Amendment in 1971; she had from the beginning in 1969 sponsored a House resolution calling for equal rights for men and women. Chisholm subscribed to the proposition that women were not inherently anything, only human. “In the end,” she wrote, “antiblack, antifemale, and all forms of discrimination are equivalent to the same thing—antihumanism.” Presidential Candidate Because black political strategists could not agree among themselves regarding the presidential election in 1972, Chisholm decided to seek the Democratic nomination, thereby becoming the first woman ever actively to seek the presidential nomination

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of a major political party. She could not win, but she could pioneer the way for others. She denied that she was the candidate of black Americans, even though she was black and proud of it, or the candidate of women, even though she was a woman and equally proud of that. “I am the candidate of the people,” she said. Only two members of the Congressional Black Caucus, Ronald Dellums and Parren Mitchell, were at her side when she announced her candidacy on January 25, 1972. The National Organization for Women did not endorse her because it would have lost its tax-exempt status, but feminists Betty Friedan and Gloria Steinem ran as Chisholm delegates for the Democratic convention in Manhattan. They lost. Militant Gay Liberation members joined her campaign in Boston. She defended their rights, too. She welcomed the support of Bobby Seale and the Black Panthers, to the chagrin of some of her advisers. An extraordinary cross-section of Americans supported her campaign, but most conspicuous in the absence of their support were black male politicians—not all, but most. The use of busing to correct racial imbalances in public schools was one of the most controversial issues of the campaign. For Chisholm, open housing was the real solution to the problem, but lacking that, busing was an expedient alternative. With only 151 delegate votes at the convention, Chisholm was obviously unable to influence its deliberations on behalf of the issues of importance to African Americans and members of other minorities, women, children, and the less fortunate. In that she failed, but in Congress she had championed the cause of job training, child welfare programs, open housing, urban development, and consumer affairs. Her work on behalf of educational opportunity programs was exemplary. She helped abolish the House Committee on Un-American Activities. She called for a national holiday in honor of Martin Luther King, Jr., and for a study commission on Afro-American history and culture. Her voice was heard across the land, and the courage of her conscience served to remind the nation of its birthright of equality and justice for all. Jimmie F. Gross

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Further Reading Brownmiller, Susan. “This Is Fighting Shirley Chisholm.” The New York Times Magazine (April 13, 1969): 32-102. Based on an interview with Chisholm. Contains information relating the congressional candidates in 1968 to the presidential candidates. Chisholm, Shirley. The Good Fight. New York: Harper & Row, 1973. Essentially an account of the presidential campaign in 1972. To some degree, it relates the campaign to the other candidates, but it is primarily focused on the issues and conficts in the state primaries. Limited scope is given to the machinations of the convention. A number of position papers are included in the appendix. ____________. Unbought and Unbossed. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1970. An autobiography that begins with her Barbadian background, of which she is particularly proud. The focus is on her election to Congress in 1968 and her opinions on a number of issues, including the Vietnam War, coalition politics, abortion, and black politicians. Duffy, Susan, comp. Shirley Chisholm: A Bibliography of Writings by and About Her. Metuchen, N.J.: Scarecrow Press, 1988. An extensive compilation of sources, indispensable to the serious student. Many of the citations are widely available. Kuriansky, Joan, and Catherine Smith. Shirley Chisholm, Democratic Representative from New York. Washington, D.C.: Grossman, 1972. Emphasis on Chisholm’s congressional actions, with some analysis of her voting record and with comments by Chisholm. Romero, Patricia W., ed. In Black America 1968: The Year of Awakening. New York: Publisher’s Company, 1969. Of general value, it provides the broad racial and political setting for understanding the context within which Chisholm launched her congressional career. See also Congressional Black Caucus; Jackson’s run for the presidency; King assassination; Politics and government; Poor People’s March on Washington; Voting Rights Act of 1965; Washington, D.C., riots; Wilder’s election to Virginia governorship

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Church bombings The Events: Racially motivated hate crimes directed against African American churches Date: 1960’s Places: Southern states The bombings of African American churches in the South generated international interest. White segregationists in the 1960’s expressed their rage at civil rights groups by destroying the churches that served as a focal point for African American activities. In the 1950’s, the slow desegregation of public facilities began in the United States. The era was symbolized by the Montgomery, Alabama, bus boycott led by ministers of African American churches including Martin Luther King, Jr. Activists, often initially African American college students, challenged public places that required separate facilities such as transportation agencies, retail outlets, and medical centers. As the Civil Rights movement developed, a broader spectrum of the African American populace and some whites participated. As more African Americans demonstrated resistance to segregation, the reaction to that resistance increased. Although the protesters were largely peaceful, the reaction to them was often violent. Bombings of African American buildings—churches, private homes, businesses, and schools—was fairly widespread by the early 1960’s. By 1963, racially motivated bombings had been reported in Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, South Carolina, and Virginia. However, some incidents went unreported because some victims were too afraid; other incidents were not publicized by local law-enforcement personnel who were often suspected of having condoned or having taken part in the bombings. The exact numbers of bombings of African American structures in the 1960’s cannot be calculated, but it certainly far exceeds the few widely publicized incidents that eventually drew national and international attention.

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Homes and Churches Besides churches, the homes of civil rights activists were a prime target. In Birmingham, Alabama, the home of the brother of Martin Luther King, Jr., was nearly demolished by a bomb. A firebomb was used to partially destroy the home of an African American congressman in Clarksdale, Mississippi, and in Jackson, Mississippi, a bomb exploded in the carport of Medgar Evers, the state’s leader of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, who was later murdered. Bombs exploded at the University of Alabama at Tuscaloosa, where an African American woman was enrolled, and at the integrated University of Mississippi at Oxford. Black-owned businesses in Birmingham, the Mississippi towns of Greenwood and Gulfport, and Charleston, South Carolina, were also targeted. In many cases, the homeowners or business employees and clientele inside the structures were injured. In most cases, the targeted people and institutions were somehow associated with desegregation events. Often, the bombings were not fully investigated, no one was charged, and perpetrators, if identified, were unrestrained. In cases where indictments were sought, penalties were sometimes modest. African American churches became a focal point of the bombings. White segregationists correctly understood how significant the churches were in the 1960’s struggles for civil rights. First, the church was the most important community organization among African American people. A majority of African Americans were either members of a church or viewed it as a center of black life in the towns and cities in which they resided; no other institution was as widespread or as symbolic of African American values. Second, the churches had historically produced communal leadership. Ministers were not only spiritual leaders, they helped educate people, provided social services to the needy, and became important political leaders. Third, civil rights activists held their major meetings as well as strategy sessions in African American churches. Often, the churches were the only sites where African Americans could gather under black leadership without interruption by whites. The churches encouraged the development of leadership that was not dependent on

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the larger community, and this group of ministerial and lay leaders was interpreted as a threat by whites attempting to preserve segregation. African American churches in the South had been vandalized and terrorized before the 1960’s, sometimes by individual whites and sometimes by groups of whites expressing racist feelings. The bombings of the 1960’s differed in that far more organization was behind the acts. Often the major white supremacist organizations, such as the Ku Klux Klan and the White Citizens Councils, planned and executed these events. Giving covert support to these organizations were white community leaders who would explicitly state their segregationist views but would not personally commit any violent acts, preferring to let the members of the supremacist organizations act on their behalf. These community leaders included governors and congressmen. Arkansas and Birmingham The most-publicized African American church bombings that took place in the 1960’s occurred in Pine Bluff and Gillet, Arkansas, and in Birmingham. In Gillet, no reason was ever given for the dynamiting of a rural African American church. In Pine Bluff, the bomb that set an African Methodist Episcopal church on fire was perceived to be a reaction to the pastor’s activities: He had been an adviser to African American students who were attempting to desegregate lunch counters in the city. The bombings of churches in Birmingham were part of forthright resistance to segregation in the 1950’s and 1960’s that included the use of fire hoses and police dogs against unarmed, peaceful civil rights protesters. By 1963, Bethel Baptist Church, an African American congregation, had been bombed twice, with devices strong enough to damage homes in the area. In the latter part of 1963, the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church was shattered by a bomb, and that event became an international symbol of the danger for African Americans struggling to desegregate the South. The church, a centrally located, large, and prestigious edifice, was the main meeting place for activists, until September 15, 1963, when a bomb not only injured worshipers but also killed four young girls aged ten to fourteen. They died in their Sunday

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Thousands of people attended the funeral of fourteen-year-old Carol Robertson, one of the girls killed in the 1963 bombing of Birmingham’s Sixteenth Street Baptist Church. (Library of Congress)

school classrooms, and their bodies were mutilated by the force of the blast. Photos of the destruction accompanied by pictures of the victims when they were alive appeared in newspapers and on television screens around the world. For many, Birmingham symbolized the depth of racism in the United States, and the four dead girls and twenty-three wounded parishioners were martyrs in a struggle for social justice. The Sixteenth Street Baptist Church was no longer safe to use for further rallies; the bombers had accomplished their immediate goal in destroying the facility. King wired Alabama governor George Wallace that the blood of the victims was on Wallace’s hands. The governor disclaimed any association with the bombers and any responsibility for establishing a social climate that would lead to such acts. Impact The response to the church bombings varied. White southern politicians who favored segregation did not admit any responsi-

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bility for the bombings, and very few clearly stated their opposition to the violence and the groups believed responsible for it. Some politicians made no comment, and others claimed that civil rights activists associated with the churches had indirectly encouraged the violence. Northern and western politicians and the international press evidenced concern and some alarm, especially following the bombing of the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church in Birmingham. This concern, along with other factors, later resulted in some national policy changes: The passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 was clearly influenced by the overt violence against religious organizations and especially by the deaths of the four children attending Sunday school in Birmingham. The image of innocent girls dying in a house of worship evoked both an emotional response and a practical one on a national and international level. However, although northern and western politicians decried the bombings, they did not relate these events to the more subtle racism that existed in their own districts. The impact of the church bombings on the African American community was quite different from the intimidation that the bombers had intended. Some researchers think that the bombings and the resulting injuries and deaths were a major factor in causing many African Americans to turn away from nonviolent protest and become more attracted to organizations that emphasized self-defense and separation of the races. Integration became less attractive; black power became more inviting. Nonviolent protest organizations such as King’s Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) were considered by some to be ineffectual in such circumstances, while the relatively militant Black Panther Party and the Nation of Islam, with its spokesperson Malcolm X, grew increasingly influential. The bombers of African American churches may have achieved their immediate goals, but they did not prevent desegregation or the empowering of African Americans. Rather, they further discredited the segregationist cause and encouraged many African Americans to move toward a more militant ideology. William Osborne Max C. E. Orezzoli

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Further Reading The bombings of churches and other buildings in the South is examined in Francis M. Wilhoit’s The Politics of Massive Resistance (1973) and Racial Violence in the United States (1969), edited by Allen Grimshaw. See also Black Christian Nationalist Movement; Black church; Church burnings; Civil Rights movement; Ku Klux Klan; R.A.V. v. City of St. Paul; Southern Christian Leadership Conference

Church burnings The Events: Many African American churches were targets of arsonists who committed copycat crimes during the 1990’s Date: June 6, 1996 Place: Charlotte, North Carolina An arsonist burned the sanctuary of the Matthews-Murkland Presbyterian Church, prompting the federal government to intensify efforts to stop church arson in the 1990’s. Church arson occurred frequently in the twentieth century. Many African American churches in the South were targets of racial violence during the Civil Rights movement in the 1950’s and 1960’s. Some supporters of segregation expressed their anger at legal decisions that initiated integration of public facilities by vandalizing African American churches. Arsonists often burned churches in which civil rights activists met in an attempt to intimidate them. Perhaps the best-known incident was the 1963 firebombing of the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama, in which four girls died. By the 1990’s, many arsonists were not motivated by racial intolerance but rather were thrill seekers or copycats. According to Morris Dees, civil rights activist and cofounder of the Southern Poverty Law Center, some arsonists burned vulnerable churches as acts of meanness rather than to achieve any political agenda. Many arsonists set fires to feel superior and powerful, to collect insurance money, or because of peer pressure. The National Fire

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Protection Association estimated that two thousand church fires occurred annually at churches with congregations consisting of various races and sects. One-fourth of these fires were arson. Because so many African American churches were burned in the mid-1990’s, black pastors testified at congressional hearings. They alleged that federal investigators did not consider the matter seriously enough. The pastors emphasized that African American communities valued churches as peaceful refuges from external conflicts. Churches heightened security, especially at night when many of the fires occurred. Nationally, businesses offered rewards for information about church arson, and newspapers reported on each fire, speculating that there was a pattern or conspiracy. The National Church Arson Task Force, consisting of federal agents affiliated with the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms (ATF) and the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), and state and local personnel, coordinated efforts to solve the crimes. Federal grants were created to rebuild burned churches. Matthews-Murkland Presbyterian Church An hour before midnight on Thursday, June 6, 1996, flames engulfed the sanctuary of the Matthews-Murkland Presbyterian Church. Built around 1903, the sanctuary had been replaced by a newer building and was no longer used for worship when it burned. The church was historically significant because it had been built by former slaves and belonged to the first all-black Presbytery in the United States. Located in an affluent southeast Charlotte neighborhood, the church had a congregation of mostly African Americans. Witnesses saw the fire and alerted emergency personnel to extinguish the blaze. Local broadcast journalists arrived on the scene in time to film the fire. This was the first church arson recorded on videotape. Footage of the church fire was broadcast internationally on the Cable News Network (CNN). No people were injured in the blaze; however, the sanctuary was destroyed with damages totaling approximately $200,000. The ATF and FBI surveyed the scene with city and state law enforcement and fire investigators. They declared the fire an arson.

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North Carolina governor Jim Hunt promised a $10,000 reward for information leading to the arrest of the arsonist. Two days after the fire, a thirteen-year-old white girl confessed that she had set the blaze as part of a Satanic ritual. She also expressed antiblack opinions but admitted that she did not know that the Matthews-Murkland Presbyterian Church was an African American church. Law enforcement officers arrested and charged the girl, whose name was not released, with arson. They found lighter fluid and other incriminating evidence in her room. During a medical evaluation, health professionals decided that she was emotionally disturbed. Based on this examination, investigators determined that the fire she set was not connected to any others. She pleaded guilty in juvenile court on July 1, 1996, and her family sent her to a mental health facility. Three months later, she was sentenced to twelve months of probation and two hundred hours of community service. Consequences On the Saturday after the fire, President Bill Clinton devoted his weekly radio address to outlining how the federal government would expand its efforts to end church burnings. He identified the Matthews-Murkland Presbyterian Church as the thirtieth southern black church razed within an eighteen-month period. Clinton accorded church arson investigation a higher priority and pledged his support for legislation that eased efforts to prosecute federally people who assaulted religious structures. At the Sunday service at Matthews-Murkland Presbyterian Church following the fire, the Reverend Larry Hill preached a sermon about forgiveness. About two hundred people, including members of Congress and prominent civil rights leaders, gathered near the sanctuary’s remains. Hill later expressed concern for the young arsonist and hope for her rehabilitation. After the girl’s confession revealed that the fire was not racially motivated, President Clinton canceled a speaking engagement at the North Carolina church. Church leaders chose to use donations to build a community center for at-risk children instead of rebuilding the sanctuary.

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Most people still believed that the church fires were set by white supremacists to express their racist beliefs. Reporter Gary Fields of USA Today investigated the church fires and determined that many journalists had incorrectly concluded that each fire fit into a larger pattern. Although some arsonists did specifically target black churches, many other arsonists acted individually for racially unrelated reasons. Both whites and African Americans were arsonists, and white churches and synagogues had also been damaged. The Charlotte arson reinforced his findings. Arsonists set fire to three North Carolina churches within one month of the Charlotte fire. The National Church Arson Task Force increased its efforts to educate people about arson and to implement preventive measures. More Americans became aware of church arson as a result of the media’s coverage of the Matthews-Murkland fire. That fire caused politicians to focus on arson. Both federal and state officials announced plans to implement stricter penalties for church arsonists. Elizabeth D. Schafer Further Reading Pinn, Anthony B. The Black Church in the Post-Civil Rights Era. Maryknoll, N.Y.: Orbis Books, 2002. See also Baptist Church; Black church; Church bombings; Congressional Black Caucus; R.A.V. v. City of St. Paul

Civil Rights Act of 1866 The Law: Federal legislation guaranteeing certain civil rights to former slaves Date: Passed by Congress on April 9, 1866 This law was the first major attempt by Congress to protect the rights of former slaves. At the end of the Civil War lay the long road of Reconstruction. As early as 1863, President Abraham Lincoln had expressed a plan for Reconstruction after the Civil War. These plans required

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a loyalty oath and acceptance of emancipation from southern states desiring readmission to the Union. It was not until after Lincoln’s assassination that Reconstruction began in earnest. Andrew Johnson, the seventeenth president of the United States, was vice president at the time of Lincoln’s death in 1865. He inherited the problems of rebuilding the country after a lengthy civil war, which had ended in April, 1865. Johnson believed that the responsibility for developing Reconstruction policy should be handled by the president. Johnson’s Reconstruction policy provided for a loyalty oath by citizens of states seeking readmission, revocation of the act of secession, abolition of slavery, and repudiation of the Confederate war debt. Several states— including Arkansas, Louisiana, and Tennessee—were readmitted in early 1865 without congressional approval. By the end of 1865, all states had been readmitted except Texas. This Reconstruction plan, however, failed to address the issues associated with the former slaves and their rights. Debt Owed to Former Slaves Congress believed that a debt was owed to the former slaves. The Freedmen’s Bureau was created in 1865 as a temporary assistance program to address some of this debt. Food, medicine, schools, and land were made available to freedmen. Early in 1866, Congress passed a new Freedmen’s Bureau Act and the first federal Civil Rights Act. Both were vetoed by President Johnson, because he feared that the legislation would extend to people of other races. He asked, “Was it sound to make all these colored people citizens?” Congress succeeded in quickly overturning these vetoes. In the Senate, J. W. Forney reported that the Senate agreed to pass the vetoed legislation with a two-thirds majority on April 6, 1866. The House of Representatives followed suit on April 9, 1866, the anniversary of the Confederacy’s surrender. During this same time, less positive events were impacting the freed blacks. The year 1866 brought the founding of the Ku Klux Klan. African Americans were subjected to killings, beatings, and torture. This often occurred to keep them out of the political arena, which offered opportunities for power. Perhaps more detrimental to African Americans was the institutionalized racism of

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the black codes. Black codes, or black laws, were legal enactments developed to regulate the actions and behaviors of freedmen in the South. These codes allowed legal marriage between African Americans, limited rights to testify in court, and limited rights to sue others. The codes also supervised the movements of African Americans in the South, restricted the assembly of unsupervised groups of African Americans, forbade intermarriage between people of color and whites, banned African Americans from carrying weapons, restricted African American children to apprenticeships that were nearly slavery, and forced African Americans into employment contracts that carried criminal penalties if abandoned. Violation of these codes often resulted in stiffer criminal punishment for African Americans than similar violations did for whites. Southern politicians reinstated by Andrew Johnson’s Reconstruction policy were responsible for passage of these codes. It was in this environment that Congress found it necessary to develop legislation to combat the antiblack sentiment. The Civil Rights Act of 1866 was the first federal law to protect the civil rights of African Americans. Section 1 of this provision established the right of citizenship to all persons born in the United States, without regard to previous servitude. As citizens, African Americans were granted the right to enter into and enforce contracts; inherit, lease, sell, hold, and convey property; give evidence in courts; benefit equally from all laws and ordinances; and be subject to punishments that were the same as given to whites for similar crimes. Section 2 provided for misdemeanor penalties for anyone who deprived another of the rights afforded in section 1. Additional sections dealt with those who were granted the authority to prosecute and enforce this legislation. In order to ensure that this legislation would be enforced, Congress further established acts that were referred to as enforcement acts. Additionally, Congress drafted the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution of the United States to protect the freedmen’s status. Constitutional Guarantees Historically, the Constitution had been the source of civil liberties for the United States. The first eight amendments to the Con-

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stitution provided for a variety of freedoms. The First Amendment granted the freedoms of speech, religion, and assembly, as well as the right to petition the government for the redress of grievances. The Second, Third, and Fourth Amendments provided for a federal militia, the right to own private property, and the right to be protected from unreasonable seizures and searches of private property. The Fifth Amendment provided for the right of due process, ensured that one need not present evidence against oneself, and prevented double jeopardy in court (that is, one cannot be tried for the same offense twice). The Sixth through Eighth Amendments provided for further fair and equitable treatment by the judicial system. The purpose of various civil rights acts has been to extend these rights to all people, particularly those groups for whom these rights were originally withheld, and provide for their enforcement. Several civil rights acts have been passed in the United States since 1866. The Civil Rights Act of 1871 made it a crime to deny equal protection under the law through duress or force. Civil rights legislation passed in 1875, which guaranteed African Americans the right to use public accommodations, was ruled unconstitutional eight years after it was passed. This continued a downhill turn in the rights of African Americans, eventually leading to the Supreme Court’s “separate but equal” decision in Plessy v. Ferguson (1896). This was the rule until 1954, when the Supreme Court determined that separate but equal was inherently unequal, in Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas. It was not until 1964, and again in 1968, that any additional civil rights legislation was enacted at the national level. The 1964 and 1968 acts prohibited discrimination in employment, in use of public accommodations such as hotels, and in housing and real estate. President Johnson’s Veto When President Andrew Johnson vetoed civil rights legislation aimed at granting rights to freed blacks, he began a two-year campaign that would end with an impeachment trial. Congressmen became increasingly concerned with Johnson’s apparent plan to subvert and sabotage Reconstruction. His appointment of former Confederate leaders who had not vowed allegiance to the

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Union, his lack of tact in dealing with those with whom he disagreed, his efforts to circumvent Congress and extend presidential powers, and his veto of important civil rights legislation resulted in a special meeting of the House of Representatives on March 2, 1867. Two measures were passed at this special session. One deprived Johnson of his responsibilities as commander in chief of the military; the second deprived him of the right to remove those with whom he disagreed from their cabinet positions. Finally, a resolution was passed to impeach Johnson for alleged violations of these measures. The senate failed to convict Johnson by one vote. However, Johnson was more compliant in the Reconstruction process after this trial. Sharon L. Larson Further Reading Abernathy, M. Glenn. Civil Liberties Under the Constitution. 5th ed. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1989. Discusses the Bill of Rights and the historical relevance of civil rights legislation. Asch, Sidney H. Civil Rights and Responsibilities Under the Constitution. New York: Arco, 1968. Analysis of amendments, such as the right-to-vote amendment, in the light of ethical questions of the day. Bardolph, Richard, ed. The Civil Rights Record: Black Americans and the Law, 1849-1870. New York: Thomas Crowell, 1970. Presents legal documentation of the African American move toward legal equality. Blaustein, Albert P., and Robert L. Zangrando, eds. Civil Rights and the American Negro: A Documentary History. New York: Trident Press, 1968. Discusses the civil rights legislation that has been passed specifically in relation to the end of slavery. Chalmers, David M. Hooded Americanism: The First Century of the Ku Klux Klan. 3d ed. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1987. A historical and political examination of the Ku Klux Klan. Lends validity to the discussion of the civil rights and emancipation legislation of the post-Civil War era. Franklin, John Hope. From Slavery to Freedom: A History of Negro Americans. 3d ed. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1967. Explores

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the progress of African Americans through slavery, emancipation, Reconstruction, and the early 1960’s Civil Rights movement. McKissack, Patricia, and Frederick McKissack. The Civil Rights Movement in America, from 1865-Present. 2d ed. Chicago: Children’s Press, 1991. A discussion of the progress in civil rights since the end of the Civil War and slavery in the United States. Weinstein, Allen, and Frank Otto Gatell. Freedom and Crisis: An American History. 2 vols. New York: Random House, 1978. Volume 2, chapter 24 discusses the dramatic events surrounding Lincoln’s assassination, Johnson’s impeachment trial, and congressional reconstruction. See also Black codes; Civil Rights Act of 1964; Emancipation Proclamation; Fourteenth Amendment; Freedmen’s Bureau; Reconstruction; Thirteenth Amendment

Civil Rights Act of 1957 The Law: First federal civil rights legislation since 1875 Date: 1957 The law created the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, to investigate complaints of violations of civil rights, along with other measures. During the mid-1950’s, the Civil Rights movement gathered momentum as it challenged racial segregation and discrimination in many areas of southern life. One area where progress proved slow was voting rights. Intimidation and irregular registration procedures limited electoral participation by African Americans. By 1957, support for legislation to protect voting rights was growing among northern Republicans and Democrats in Congress. Yet Congress had not passed a civil rights bill since 1875, and there was strong southern opposition to any change in the status quo. It was, however, Senator Lyndon B. Johnson of Texas, the Senate majority leader, who took the lead. Not known at this point in his career as an advocate of civil rights, Johnson used his considerable legislative ability to shepherd the new bill through Congress.

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It passed just as the Little Rock school desegregation crisis was breaking. The bill had several major provisions. It created a new body, the Civil Rights Commission, to investigate complaints of violations of civil rights. It raised the Civil Rights Section of the Department of Justice to the status of a division, to be headed by an assistant attorney general. It also made it a federal crime to harass those attempting to vote and allowed the attorney general to initiate proceedings against those violating the law. The law’s short-term effects were modest. Though the number of African American voters did grow, many impediments to voting remained, especially in the rural South. Many criticized the act’s weak enforcement procedures: The Civil Rights Commission could gather information and investigate complaints, but it could take no action to protect those trying to vote. Not until the Voting Rights Act of 1965 would effective machinery for ensuring voting rights be established. On the other hand, in the early 1960’s, the administration of President John F. Kennedy did use the act’s provisions (which were strengthened by the 1960 Civil Rights Act) to proceed against some of the worst cases of harassment. Also the act broke a psychological barrier by putting the first national civil rights law in eighty-two years on the books. It also highlighted the importance of voting rights to the overall civil rights struggle. William C. Lowe See also Civil Rights Act of 1960; Civil Rights Act of 1964; Civil Rights Act of 1968; Civil Rights Act of 1991; Civil Rights Acts of 1866-1875; Civil Rights cases; Little Rock school desegregation crisis; United States Commission on Civil Rights

Civil Rights Act of 1960 The Law: Federal legislation extending voting rights protections Date: May 6, 1960 The law proved unable to cope with many problems confronting African Americans in the South.

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The Fifteenth Amendment to the Constitution, passed in 1870, was designed to protect the right of African Americans to vote. The amendment simply says: “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.” Officials in the southern states, however, found numerous ways to disfranchise black voters without violating the Fifteenth Amendment, such as the literacy test, poll tax, grandfather clause, and white primary. As a result of these voting barriers, most African Americans were eliminated as voters, in spite of what the Fifteenth Amendment was designed to do. Enforcing the Fifteenth Amendment The civil rights bills of the late 1950’s and the 1960’s were designed to make the Fifteenth Amendment enforceable. Since the end of Reconstruction, Congress had passed only one civil rights bill, in 1957. The 1957 law sought to empower the federal government to protect voting rights by seeking injunctions against voting rights violations. In reality, the 1957 law was so weak that

President Dwight D. Eisenhower signing the Civil Rights Act of 1960. (Library of Congress)

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only a few suits were brought by the Department of Justice against the illegal practices of voting officials. The 1957 Civil Rights Act established the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, which was given the authority to investigate civil rights abuses. The commission could draw national attention to civil rights problems and recommend legislation to Congress, but it had no enforcement powers. African Americans and civil rights supporters realized that something substantial was needed to protect black voting rights. In 1959, President Dwight D. Eisenhower introduced a sevenpoint civil rights program. Three parts of the bill dealt with education and school desegregation, the most significant provision being the attempt to make it a crime to interfere with court-ordered desegregation. The bill requested a two-year extension of the Civil Rights Commission and contained several other provisions to combat economic discrimination. The only section of the law that involved voting rights was the provision that states must preserve voting records for three years. This provision was needed to prove whether there was a pattern or practice of discrimination in voting. Conspicuously missing from the Eisenhower bill was a request that Congress authorize the attorney general to bring civil proceedings to protect voting rights. This provision, known as Title III, had been the heart of the administration’s 1957 Civil Rights Act. Title III would have allowed the federal government to prevent interference with civil rights instead of only being able to punish such interference after the fact. Intense southern opposition to Title III forced the administration to abandon the provision in the 1957 Civil Rights Act, as Eisenhower believed that Congress was not ready to incorporate Title III in the administration’s new bill. The House judiciary subcommittee, comprising mostly northern civil rights supporters, strengthened the Eisenhower bill and restored Title III. The full Judiciary Committee, containing many southern opponents of civil rights, quickly gutted most of the stronger sections passed by the subcommittee. The weakened bill was passed by the Judiciary Committee and forwarded to the important Rules Committee. The Rules Committee, chaired by

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Howard Smith, a Virginia segregationist, did not act on the bill until civil rights supporters threatened to discharge the bill from the Rules Committee’s jurisdiction. The Democratic Study Group, a newly formed organization consisting of liberal Democrats, led the movement to free the bill from the Rules Committee. The Rules Committee finally sent the civil rights bill to the floor of the House for consideration by the entire House. Southern Opposition Southern Democrats led much of the opposition to the bill. Opponents contended that the bill went too far in protecting voting rights and encroached on the rights of states to control the election process. Representative William Colmer, a Democrat from Mississippi, said that “even in the darkest days of Reconstruction, the Congress never went as far as the proponents of this legislation, in this 1960 election year, propose to go.” After defeating numerous southern amendments to weaken an already weak bill, the House voted 311 to 109 to approve the civil rights bill and send it to the Senate. The United States Senate has often been the burial ground of civil rights laws, especially during the 1940’s, 1950’s, and 1960’s. This was primarily the result of two factors. First, southern Democrats, by virtue of their seniority, controlled many key committees, including the Judiciary Committee, to which civil rights legislation, by jurisdiction, must be referred. Second, southern senators were skillful in the use of legislative tactics, such as the filibuster, to kill legislation. The Eisenhower bill was sent to the Senate Judiciary Committee, chaired by Democratic senator James Eastland of Mississippi. Eastland, a staunch segregationist, refused to act on the bill. Only as a result of a parliamentary maneuver undertaken by Majority Leader Lyndon Johnson and Minority Leader Everett Dirksen was the bill brought to the floor of the Senate for debate. Southern senators, led by Democrat Richard Russell of Georgia, organized a filibuster. All southern senators participated in the filibuster, with the exception of the two senators from Tennessee and the two senators from Texas. Supporters of the civil rights bill attempted to end the lengthy filibuster by invoking cloture,

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which required two-thirds of the Senate to vote to stop the filibuster. When the cloture vote took place, only forty-two of the one hundred senators voted to stop the filibuster. The civil rights supporters not only failed to get the two-thirds vote required but also failed to muster a simple majority. Passage The defeat of cloture meant that the southern Democratic senators had won and could dictate the terms of the final bill. The final, watered-down version of the bill contained little that would protect the voting rights of African Americans. The most significant provision authorized federal judges to appoint federal referees to assist African Americans in registering and voting if a pattern or practice of discrimination was found. The Senate passed the weakened bill by seventy-one to eighteen, and President Eisenhower signed the bill into law on May 6, 1960. The fact that only two other individuals were present when Eisenhower signed the bill into law testifies to its legislative insignificance. Perhaps the weakness of the 1960 Civil Rights Act was its main legacy. The law proved to be unable to cope with many problems confronting African Americans in the South. Many African Americans who attempted to register or vote lost their jobs, were subjected to violence, or were victimized by double standards or outright fraud on the part of voting officials. The impotence of the 1960 Civil Rights Act to deal with these issues, combined with the lack of progress in increasing the number of African American voters in the South, forced Congress to pass the powerful Voting Rights Act in 1965. This legislation would forever transform the political landscape of the South, and its consequences have continued to be felt. Darryl Paulson Further Reading Abernathy, Charles F. Civil Rights and Constitutional Litigation: Cases and Materials. 2d ed. St. Paul, Minn.: West, 1992. Somewhat technical, but an interesting approach to the interplay between congressional and judicial sources of civil rights.

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Berman, Daniel M. A Bill Becomes a Law: Congress Enacts Civil Rights Legislation. New York: Macmillan, 1966. Case study of the passage of the 1960 Civil Rights Act. Black, Earl, and Merle Black. The Vital South: How Presidents Are Elected. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1992. Examines how presidential politics changed in the South, primarily as a result of the passage of civil rights laws. Lawson, Steven F. In Pursuit of Power: Southern Blacks and Electoral Politics, 1965-1982. New York: Columbia University Press, 1985. Investigates how civil rights and voting rights laws have impacted Southern politics of blacks and whites. Tate, Katherine. From Protest to Politics: The New Black Voters in American Elections. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1994. Demonstrates how U.S. politics in the 1990’s was influenced by the policies of prior decades. Whalen, Charles, and Barbara Whalen. The Longest Debate: A Legislative History of the 1964 Civil Rights Act. Washington, D.C.: Seven Locks Press, 1985. A former member of Congress provides an inside view of the politics surrounding the 1964 Civil Rights Act. See also Civil Rights Act of 1957; Civil Rights Act of 1964; Civil Rights Act of 1968; Civil Rights Act of 1991; Civil Rights Acts of 1866-1875; Congress of Racial Equality; “I Have a Dream” speech; Katzenbach v. McClung; Smith v. Allwright; Twenty-fourth Amendment; United States Commission on Civil Rights; Voting Rights Act of 1965

Civil Rights Act of 1964 The Law: Landmark federal legislation that expanded voting rights protections and established new protections against employment discrimination and discrimination in public accommodations Date: July 2, 1964 Responding to a vigorous activist movement, Congress passes the most far-reaching civil rights legislation since Reconstruction.

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The road to the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 was long and tortuous. In June, 1963, President John F. Kennedy had addressed the nation and appealed to the American people to cooperate to meet the crisis in race relations. On June 19, he urged Congress to enact an omnibus bill to meet the demands of African Americans for racial equality. The bill he proposed included titles dealing with public accommodations, employment, federally assisted programs, and education. Background The bill was reported by the House committee in November, just two days before the assassination of President Kennedy (November 22, 1963) in Dallas. As the stunned nation recovered, there was an outpouring of emotion for the late president. President Lyndon B. Johnson addressed the Congress and urged it to honor President Kennedy’s memory with the passage of the omnibus civil rights bill. Johnson, who had been viewed as a part of the conservative establishment opposed to civil rights when he was Senate majority leader, now became its most vigorous champion. Whether this transformation came from a change in conscience, a change in position, or a desire to be seen as a national leader cannot be known, but Johnson made a firm commitment to civil rights in his state of the union address. He challenged the new Congress to become known as the one that had done more for civil rights than any in one hundred years. Martin Luther King, Jr., who had been at the forefront of a decade of struggle by African Americans for equality, gave his support to President Johnson at the time. However, he announced plans to resume demonstrations, which had been suspended since the assassination of President Kennedy, to make it clear to Congress and the country that the time to pass a civil rights bill had come. Together with the lobbying of civil rights groups and the efforts of activists and leaders, in cooperation with labor and religious leaders, King’s actions forced the passage of the bill in the House. Despite the favorable action in the House, success in the Senate was difficult because of a filibuster. Senator Hubert H. Humphrey, who was a coordinator for the civil rights effort in the Senate, worked to gain the cooperation of Senator

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Everett M. Dirksen, the Senate minority leader. After compromise language was worked out with Senator Dirksen, a bipartisan vote ended the filibuster, and the Civil Rights Act of 1964 was passed on July 2. The passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act was largely in response to protests and demonstrations initiated by civil rights activists and African American leaders. In the 1950’s, African Americans had mobilized a social movement to eradicate the social injustices they faced throughout the United States. The mass effort to end legal segregation in public accommodations in the South had been sparked by Rosa Parks, an African American woman who, in 1955, had disobeyed the law by refusing to relinquish her seat to a white man on a crowded bus in Montgomery, Alabama. The subsequent Montgomery bus boycott heralded a new Civil Rights movement, which ended the Jim Crow laws that had forbidden African Americans from using the same public accommodations—transportation, hotels, restaurants, schools, and other public facilities—along with whites. Leaders such as Malcolm X—who encouraged African Americans to challenge unfair practices and laws by teaching black nationalism and racial pride—also played a major role in the passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act. Provisions of the Act The act contained provisions designed to eliminate discrimination in public accommodations and in other areas such as voting, employment, federally funded programs, and education. Although laws had been passed in 1957 and 1960 to eliminate voting discrimination, unfairly administered literacy tests were still used to discriminate against African Americans. The 1964 act prohibited local officials from applying different standards to African Americans and whites when literacy tests were administered in federal elections. Completion of the sixth grade in an English-language school created a presumption of literacy. Voting was viewed as a local issue, and there was general concern by those who opposed the Civil Rights Act that it would permit undue intervention of the federal government into local affairs. This argument was significant in determining the authority

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President Lyndon B. Johnson signing the Civil Rights Act of 1964, as other government officials and civil rights leaders look on. (Library of Congress)

of the attorney general to bring suits concerning voting discrimination. The issue was resolved by providing that the attorney general could bring action if it were determined that a pattern of discrimination existed to prevent citizens from voting. This limited the possible federal intervention in local affairs, because litigation could not be initiated for an isolated incident of discrimination against one citizen. The act provided for a three-judge federal district court to hear cases of voter discrimination, which then could be appealed directly to the Supreme Court. One problem with the 1957 and 1960 acts had been the great length of time required to bring suit and process an appeal. The voting provisions of the 1964 act brought little change, and a major voting rights bill was passed the following year. The results of the public accommodations provisions of the 1964 act were more impressive. Hotels, restaurants, service stations, places of amusement, and government-owned public facilities were forbidden to discriminate because of race, color, religion, or national origin. Although the attorney general could intervene only in cases of general public importance, discriminatory practices in public accommodations changed dramatically,

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and in a short time, the rigid separation of the races in places of public accommodation ended. Ending discrimination in public accommodations proved to be much easier than desegregating schools or eliminating employment discrimination. The U.S. Supreme Court had decided in 1954 in Brown v. Board of Education that maintaining separate schools for African Americans and whites was unconstitutional, because African Americans were being deprived of their right to equal protection, as guaranteed by the Fourteenth Amendment. The Court held that in the sphere of public education, the doctrine of separate but equal was impracticable and that school desegregation should occur with all deliberate speed. However, schools were slow to comply with the Court’s decision. A strong stand by Congress was important, because the courts had borne the entire burden of school desegregation, and they were vulnerable to the charge of usurping the power of Congress to make law. In cases of school discrimination, the attorney general was given greater latitude in bringing suits than in other civil rights areas, having only to determine that a complaint was valid and that the complainant was unable to maintain a suit before court action could be initiated. Although the attorney general’s power in this area was more extensive than in other civil rights matters, Congress made clear that the goal was desegregation only; the 1964 act did not give any official or court the power to order racial balance. Guidelines issued by the Office of Education were important in reducing segregation in schools. These guidelines also stipulated that there could be no discrimination in programs funded by the federal government. Because the federal government funds a great variety of programs, such as housing and urban development, the potential for this provision as a weapon against discrimination is great. Preventing discrimination in employment was another major goal of the Civil Rights Act. Employers were forbidden to discriminate on the basis of race, color, religion, national origin, and (unlike the other parts of the 1964 act) sex. The act covers employers’ practices in hiring, paying, promoting, and dismissing employees; referral by employment agencies; and trade unions’ admission of members. Employers with as few as twenty-five

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employees ultimately would be covered, but this figure would be reached over three years. Employers were required to keep records, which have been useful in determining practices of discrimination. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission An Equal Employment Opportunity Commission was established but, until a 1972 amendment, did not have power to bring suit against an employer. The commission could only try to persuade the employer; if that failed, the case could be referred to the attorney general with a recommendation that a suit be instituted. The attorney general had the power to bring suit not only upon the recommendation of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission but also if there was a pattern or practice of discrimination. If a suit were brought and there was a finding of discrimination, the court had a wide range of remedies: It could enjoin the employer from further discriminatory practice, order reinstatement of an employee with back pay, or order the hiring of an employee. However, the act specifically stated that an employer is not required to grant preferential treatment because of an imbalance in the races of employees. The act, at that time revolutionary in its coverage, would nevertheless encounter obstacles to its effectiveness. These limitations included the large caseloads of enforcement agencies, such as the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, delaying timely investigations; the great length of time required to litigate cases; difficulty in retaining attorneys; the high costs of litigation; problems in identifying coworkers willing to be witnesses; and reverse discrimination lawsuits arguing that employer policies to ensure the civil rights of protected classes violate the civil rights of others. Many of these conditions would hinder the effectiveness of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, its provisions, and enforcement agencies. Thus, although the 1964 Civil Rights Act has remained the foundation of a series of civil rights acts passed since the 1960’s, the goal of equal opportunity for all citizens of the United States has continued to be a worthwhile and necessary pursuit. Doris F. Pierce Updated by K. Sue Jewell

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Further Reading Abraham, Henry J. Freedom and the Court: Civil Rights and Liberties in the United States. New York: Oxford University Press, 1967. Focuses on civil rights and liberties in the United States. Bell, Derrick. Faces at the Bottom of the Well: The Permanence of Racism. New York: Basic Books, 1992. Employs literary models in addressing how African Americans experience injustice in the judicial system. ____________. Race, Racism, and American Law. 2d ed. Boston: Little, Brown, 1977. A comprehensive analysis of U.S. law that reveals how racial inequality is integrated into the legislative and judicial systems. Harvey, James C. Black Civil Rights During the Johnson Administration. Jackson: University and College Press of Mississippi, 1973. An analysis of the political influences and compromises at the birth of the civil rights laws of the Lyndon Johnson administration. Jewell, K. Sue. From Mammy to Miss America and Beyond: Cultural Images and the Shaping of U.S. Social Policy. New York: Routledge, 1993. Discusses how institutional policies and practices in the United States contribute to social inequality for African Americans in general, and African American women in particular. ____________. Survival of the Black Family: The Institutional Impact of U.S. Social Policy. New York: Praeger, 1988. Examines how societal institutions, including the legal system, affect the stability of the African American family. Kotz, Nick. Judgment Days: Lyndon Baines Johnson, Martin Luther King, Jr., and the Laws That Changed America. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2005. An examination of two of the most prominent men behind the 1964 act. Schwartz, Bernard, ed. Civil Rights. Vol. 2 in Statutory History of the United States. New York: Chelsea House, 1970. Contains the actual texts of the acts together with debates and commentaries. See also Civil Rights Act of 1866; Civil Rights Act of 1957; Civil Rights Act of 1960; Civil Rights Act of 1968; Civil Rights Act of 1991; Civil Rights Acts of 1866-1875; Civil Rights cases; Civil

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Rights movement; Civil Rights Restoration Act; Cooper v. Aaron; Equal Employment Opportunity Act of 1972; Equal Employment Opportunity Commission; Fair Employment Practices Committee; Fair Housing Act; Fourteenth Amendment; Fullilove v. Klutznick; Griggs v. Duke Power Company; Katzenbach v. McClung; National Association for the Advancement of Colored People; Southern Christian Leadership Conference; Twenty-fourth Amendment; United States Commission on Civil Rights; Voting Rights Act of 1965

Civil Rights Act of 1968 The Law: Federal legislation prohibiting housing discrimination Date: April 11, 1968 The Civil Rights Act of 1968 banned racial discrimination in the sale or rental of most types of housing. After 1965, the Civil Rights movement devoted increasing attention to conditions in the North. It found much segregation there, a condition that was rooted in residential patterns rather than in Jim Crow laws. The prevalence of segregated housing determined the composition of schools and other aspects of urban life. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s Chicago campaign in 1966 focused national attention on the housing issue. His lack of success showed that white resistance to opening neighborhoods to minority residents was strong and would be difficult to overcome. Urban riots in northern and western cities provoked a “white backlash,” as many northern whites ceased their support for further civil rights reform. In 1966 and 1967, President Lyndon B. Johnson tried and failed to persuade Congress to pass civil rights bills outlawing discrimination in housing. Passing the Act In 1968, liberal Democrats in the Senate brought forward a new civil rights bill containing a fair housing provision. Heavy lobbying by Clarence Mitchell, of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), helped to marshal a

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majority of senators in support of the bill. As with earlier civil rights measures, southern senators attempted to talk the bill to death with a filibuster. However, in return for some relatively minor modifications in the bill, the leader of the Republican minority, Senator Everett Dirksen of Illinois, agreed to support an attempt to cut off the filibuster. This succeeded, and the bill passed the Senate on March 11, 1968. In the House of Representatives, passage was far from sure. The assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr., on April 4, however, shocked the country and dramatically altered the political landscape. Support for the bill grew; it passed easily and was signed by President Johnson on April 11. Fair Housing The main thrust of the 1968 Civil Rights Act was to outlaw discrimination on the basis of race, religion, or national origin in the sale and rental of most forms of housing in the United States, as well as in the advertising, listing, and financing of housing. Exempted from the act’s coverage were single-family houses not listed with real estate agents and small apartment buildings lived in by the owner. (About a month after the act became law, the Supreme Court ruled, in the case of Jones v. Alfred H. Mayer Company, that the Civil Rights Act of 1866 prohibited racial discrimination in housing and other property transactions.) Two other provisions of the act also grew out of the racial turmoil of the 1960’s. One enumerated specific civil rights whose violations were punishable under federal law. Another sought to make the act more acceptable to the growing number of Americans concerned about urban riots by specifying stiff penalties for inciting or engaging in riots. As a housing measure, the act proved disappointing. Its enforcement provisions were weak. Those with complaints of discrimination were directed to file them with the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD), which would then attempt to negotiate a voluntary settlement. If this failed, complainants would have to file their own lawsuits; the federal government would intervene only in cases where there was a clear pattern of past discrimination. In addition, white resentment at attempts to integrate neighborhoods remained high. Banks often

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found ways to avoid the law’s provisions, making it difficult for many African American families to secure necessary financing. By the late twentieth century, it was clear that the act had not ended the country’s dominant pattern of racial segregation in housing. The Indian Bill of Rights The Civil Rights Act of 1968 contained another provision unrelated to concerns over fair housing: the Indian Bill of Rights. This was grounded in the fact that Indians on reservations, as members of tribal communities, were not considered to be covered by the Bill of Rights. In 1896, the Supreme Court had ruled, in the case of Talton v. Mayes, that the Bill of Rights did not apply to Indian tribes or to their courts. In 1961, Senator Sam Ervin, a North Carolina Democrat, was surprised to discover the fact. Over the next several years, he held hearings on the subject. In 1968, he was able to amend the civil rights bill moving through the Senate to include coverage of Indian rights. The Indian Bill of Rights extended a variety of constitutional protections to Native Americans with regard to the authority of their tribal governments. Among these were freedom of speech and religion, as well as protections for those suspected or accused of crimes. In fact, all or part of the First, Fourth, Fifth, Six, and Eighth Amendments were held to apply to reservation Indians, as was the Fourteenth Amendment’s guarantee of due process. Some parts of the Bill of Rights were not included, however; the First Amendment’s ban of religious establishments was not included, in deference to tribal customs, nor were the Second Amendment’s right to bear arms or the Third’s prohibition against the quartering of troops. Most important to most Indians was a provision that required tribal permission before states could further extend jurisdiction over tribal land. William C. Lowe Further Reading Useful views of the 1968 Civil Rights Act may be found in James A. Kushner’s Fair Housing: Discrimination in Real Estate, Community Development, and Revitalization (New York: McGraw-

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Hill, 1983), Lyndon B. Johnson’s The Vantage Point: Perspectives of the Presidency 1963-1969 (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1971), Donald G. Nieman’s Promises to Keep: African-Americans and the Constitutional Order, 1776 to the Present (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991), and John R. Wunder’s “Retained by the People”: A History of the American Indians and the Bill of Rights (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994). See also Civil Rights Act of 1957; Civil Rights Act of 1960; Civil Rights Act of 1964; Civil Rights Act of 1991; Civil Rights Acts of 1866-1875; Civil Rights movement; Jones v. Alfred H. Mayer Company; Katzenbach v. McClung; Shelley v. Kraemer; United States Commission on Civil Rights

Civil Rights Act of 1991 The Law: Federal legislation prohibiting employment discrimination Date: November 21, 1991 The 1991 Civil Rights Act made it easier for those who considered themselves victims of various types of discrimination to bring their cases to court. To many supporters of the Civil Rights movement, the 1980’s was a decade of disappointment, when earlier gains seemed threatened by unsympathetic presidents and a conservative political atmosphere. Especially troubling from this viewpoint was the direction taken by the U.S. Supreme Court. In 1989, the Court issued a number of decisions that seemed to endanger past protections against employment discrimination by making the position of voluntary affirmative action programs less secure (Richmond v. J. A. Croson Company), making it more difficult for women and members of minorities to sue for job discrimination (Wards Cove Packing Company v. Atonio), and reducing protection against racial harassment on the job (Patterson v. McLean Credit Union). Reaction against these decisions, especially the last two, made it easier for liberal Democrats to create a bipartisan coalition in

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Congress in support of an effort to pass a new civil rights bill. Though the administration of President George Bush did not initially support the bill, the president did sign the bill when it finally passed after two years of congressional consideration and debate. The Civil Rights Act of 1991 took the form of a series of amendments to Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Among its many sections were three important provisions. One sought to overturn the Wards Cove decision, which had required those claiming employment discrimination to prove that a specific employer practice had created a discriminatory effect and allowed employers to justify such a practice as a “business necessity.” The act eliminated the latter claim as a defense against a charge of intentional discrimination. Another provision counteracted the Patterson decision by extending the 1875 Civil Rights Act’s ban on racial discrimination in contracts to cover protection from harassment on the job. Finally, the act allowed victims of discrimination to sue for larger monetary damages in cases brought under the 1964 Civil Rights Act and the 1990 Americans with Disabilities Act. Though rather technical and legalistic in character, the 1991 Civil Rights Act did make it easier for those who considered themselves victims of various types of discrimination to bring their cases to court. William C. Lowe See also Civil Rights Act of 1957; Civil Rights Act of 1960; Civil Rights Act of 1964; Civil Rights Act of 1968; Civil Rights Acts of 1866-1875; Equal Employment Opportunity Commission; Griggs v. Duke Power Company; Runyon v. McCrary; United States Commission on Civil Rights

Civil Rights Acts of 1866-1875 The Laws: Federal legislation granting citizenship rights to African Americans and outlawing racial discrimination in public accommodations Dates: April 9, 1866 and March 1, 1875

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Although the Civil Rights Acts of the Reconstruction era failed to secure any long-lasting equality for African Americans, they did provide points of reference for the Civil Rights movement of the 1950’s and 1960’s. After the Thirteenth Amendment abolished slavery throughout the United States in 1865, almost all freed blacks were without property or education, and most white southerners bitterly opposed any fundamental improvement in their political and social status. In 1865-1866, southern legislatures enacted the highly discriminatory black codes, and proponents of racial equality responded by calling for new federal laws. Congress, using its new authority under the Thirteenth Amendment, overrode President Andrew Johnson’s veto to pass the first Civil Rights Act on April 9, 1866. This law conferred citizenship on African Americans, a measure necessitated by the Supreme Court’s Dred Scott decision (Scott v. Sandford, 1857). The law included a list of enumerated rights, including the right to make and enforce contracts, to sue and give evidence in court, and to purchase and inherit all forms of property. It also punished

One of the provisions of the Civil Rights Act of 1875 banned racial segregation on public transportation, but the Supreme Court overturned the act eight years later. (Library of Congress)

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public officials if they used their legal powers to deny equality to African Americans. Since the law’s constitutionality was questionable, many of its major provisions were incorporated into the Fourteenth Amendment. On July 16, 1866, Congress again overrode President Johnson’s veto, this time to enlarge the scope of the Freedmen’s Bureau. Among other items, this law authorized the bureau to use military commissions to try persons accused of violating the civil rights of freedmen. Again voting to override a presidential veto on March 2, 1867, Congress passed the First Reconstruction Act. Dividing the South into five military districts, the act required southern states to call new constitutional conventions elected by universal manhood suffrage and to ratify the Fourteenth Amendment. Under the act, 703,000 African Americans and 627,000 whites were registered as voters, with black majorities in five states. As the Ku Klux Klan conducted a wave of terrorism against African Americans and Republicans in the South, Congress responded with the Ku Klux Klan Acts of 1870 and 1871, which provided police protection to enforce the rights guaranteed in the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments. In several decisions, such as United States v. Cruikshank (1876), the Supreme Court ruled that key parts of the statutes exceeded the constitutional powers of Congress. Finally, on March 1, 1875, President Ulysses S. Grant signed into law the Civil Rights Act of 1875. This far-reaching act, largely the work of Senator Charles Sumner, outlawed discrimination based on race in public accommodations (inns, businesses, theaters, and the like) and made it illegal to exclude African Americans from jury trials. In the Civil Rights cases (1883), however, the Supreme Court struck down most of the 1875 law, holding that the Fourteenth Amendment did not authorize Congress to prohibit discrimination by private individuals. This decision ended almost all federal attempts to protect African Americans from private discrimination until the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Although the Civil Rights Acts of the Reconstruction era failed to guarantee any long-lasting equality for African Americans,

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they did provide points of reference for the Civil Rights movement of the 1950’s and 1960’s. The Civil Rights Act of 1866 was resurrected in Jones v. Alfred H. Mayer Company (1968), when the Supreme Court upheld its use to outlaw private racial discrimination in economic transactions as a “badge of slavery.” Thomas Tandy Lewis See also Black codes; Civil Rights Act of 1957; Civil Rights Act of 1960; Civil Rights Act of 1964; Civil Rights Act of 1968; Civil Rights Act of 1991; Civil Rights cases; Civil War; Disfranchisement laws in Mississippi; Fourteenth Amendment; Freedmen’s Bureau; Grandfather clauses; Jones v. Alfred H. Mayer Company; Ku Klux Klan; Race riots of 1866; Reconstruction; Runyon v. McCrary; Scott v. Sandford; Thirteenth Amendment; United States Commission on Civil Rights; United States v. Cruikshank

Civil Rights cases The Cases: U.S. Supreme Court rulings in five cases pertaining to Thirteenth and Fourteenth Amendments Date: October 15, 1883 The Court ruled that Congress could not outlaw discrimination by private parties under the authority of the Civil War Amendments, and Congress was prevented from legislating against private discrimination in public accommodations for nearly one hundred years. In the aftermath of the Civil War, the U.S. Constitution was amended three times in five years. The three amendments, taken as a whole, were designed not only to end slavery but also to eliminate its “badges and incidents.” Each of the amendments contained a clause empowering Congress to pass implementing legislation. In 1875, Congress passed a Civil Rights Act that made it illegal for anyone to deny access to places of public accommodation—including inns, public transportation, and theaters—on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude. Five cases claiming violations of the public accommodations provisions were consolidated for decision by the Supreme Court.

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The Court vs. Congress The Court ruled that Congress did not have the authority to prohibit discrimination by private individuals. Justice Joseph P. Bradley’s majority opinion analyzed the congressional authority granted by two of the Civil War Amendments. The Fourteenth Amendment, he said, gave Congress authority to provide relief from state action which interfered with a person’s rights to due process of law and to equal protection of the laws. The amendment did not allow Congress to legislate against an invasion of rights by private individuals. Such power belonged to the state alone. Since the Civil Rights Act purported to provide a remedy for private discrimination, it exercised a congressional power not granted by the Constitution. In regard to the Thirteenth Amendment, the Supreme Court conceded that Congress had been empowered to abolish “all badges and incidents of slavery”; however, the “badges and incidents” included only legal disabilities, such as the inability to make contracts, hold property, and have standing in court. They did not include the “social rights of men and races in the community.” The Court concluded that it was time for the former slave to “take the rank of a mere citizen, and cease to be the special favorite of the laws.” In his dissent, Justice John Marshall Harlan argued that since state governments established and maintained the roads, highways, and harbors used by public conveyances, and since the states licensed theaters, inns, and other places of public accommodation, state tolerance of discrimination amounted to state action that furthered discrimination in violation of the Fourteenth Amendment. The significance of the Civil Rights cases is twofold. First, the Court ruled that Congress could not outlaw discrimination by private parties under the authority of the Civil War Amendments. Therefore, the victims of racial discrimination could expect relief only from state governments, which, in the South, had by 1883 reverted to the control of white supremacists. Second, the Civil Rights cases prevented Congress from legislating against private discrimination in public accommodations for nearly one hundred years. In 1964, Congress passed a Civil Rights Act that

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drew its authority not from the Civil War Amendments but from the “commerce clause” in the U.S. Constitution. William H. Coogan See also Black codes; Civil Rights Act of 1957; Civil Rights Act of 1964; Civil Rights Acts of 1866-1875; Disfranchisement laws in Mississippi; Fourteenth Amendment; Jim Crow laws; Jones v. Alfred H. Mayer Company; Moose Lodge v. Irvis; Plessy v. Ferguson; Race riots of 1866; Thirteenth Amendment; United States v. Cruikshank

Civil Rights movement The Event: Mass movement led by African Americans during the mid-twentieth century Date: mid-1950’s to late 1960’s The modern Civil Rights movement broke down many racial barriers, forced legislative changes, and transformed American politics and society. Although the modern Civil Rights movement began with the Montgomery bus boycott in 1955, the struggle for civil rights has been an ongoing battle. The founding of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) in 1909 was one of the first attempts to organize in the pursuit of civil rights. With the exception of some legal victories under the leadership of the NAACP, there was little progress in the field of civil rights until the end of World War II. Voting Rights and a Legacy of Discrimination With the end of Reconstruction after the Civil War, all the southern states developed devices to eliminate black voters. Each of the southern states adopted new state constitutions between 1890 and 1910 and employed devices such as the grandfather clause, the white primary, the poll tax, and the literacy test to strip African Americans of their right to vote. These devices were enormously successful. There were more than 130,000 black vot-

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ers in Louisiana in 1896. By 1900, only two years after Louisiana adopted a new constitution containing many discriminating features, there were only 5,320 black voters left on the rolls. For several reasons, African Americans made securing the right to vote their number-one objective. First, the U.S. Constitution, particularly the Fifteenth Amendment, contains specific guarantees against voter discrimination. Second, African Americans believed there was less social stigma involved in granting the right to vote than in integration. Integration meant race mixing, which was feared by white southerners. Giving African Americans the right to vote did not mean that whites would have to intermingle with African Americans. Finally, African Americans believed that securing the right to vote would bring about other changes. Black voting would result in the election of black politicians, and it would force white politicians to moderate their racial views. The grandfather clause was the first major barrier to fall. Grandfather clauses said that if a person had a relative who voted before the Civil War (before 1861), then the person was exempt from other voter qualifications. Because African Americans were not allowed to vote before the Civil War, they had to meet voter qualifications such as poll taxes and literacy tests. The U.S. Supreme Court unanimously struck down grandfather clauses in Guinn v. United States (1915). The next major barrier to fall was the white primary election. As the term implies, only whites were permitted to vote in primaries. Since southern politics was dominated by the Democratic Party, whoever won the Democratic primary would win the general election. If African Americans could not participate in the primary selection process, then they had no real input into the selection of political candidates. In 1924, the Texas legislature passed a law prohibiting African Americans from participating in that state’s primary election. A unanimous U.S. Supreme Court struck down the Texas law in Nixon v. Herndon (1927). Immediately, the Texas legislature passed another law delegating authority to the executive committee of each party to determine who could participate in the primaries. As expected, they excluded African Americans from

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A longtime civil rights activist, Ella Jo Baker, helped found the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, and was one of many women who played prominent roles in the Civil Rights movement. (Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, New York Public Library)

participation. In a 5-4 decision, the U.S. Supreme Court once again threw out Texas’s white primary in Nixon v. Condon (1932). Undaunted, Texas made a third effort to ban African Americans from the primaries. In 1932, the state convention of the Texas Democratic Party, without any authorization from the state legislature, limited primaries to white voters. A unanimous U.S. Supreme Court, in Grovey v. Townsend (1935), upheld the action of the state convention, concluding that there was no state discrimination involved. Political parties were voluntary associations that had the right to determine their membership. It was not until Smith v. Allwright (1944), some twenty years after the first Texas white primary law was passed, that the U.S. Supreme Court finally declared white primaries to be unconstitutional. The NAACP had brought most of the white primary cases, including the Smith case, to the U.S. Supreme Court. The third major voting barrier to fall was the poll tax, which was the payment of a fee in order to vote. African Americans were less able to afford the tax, and poor whites could always find someone to pay or waive their tax. Opponents of the poll tax tried to get Congress to abolish the fee. Five times the House of Representatives passed legislation to ban poll taxes, but each

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time the legislation was filibustered by southern senators. In 1964, the Twenty-fourth Amendment, which eliminated poll taxes in federal elections, was approved. Two years later, in Harper v. Virginia Board of Elections, the U.S. Supreme Court abolished poll taxes in state and local elections. The last barrier to fall was also the most significant barrier in keeping African Americans from voting: the literacy test. Most literacy tests required the voter to be able to read, write, and understand sections of the state or federal constitution. Although many African Americans could pass the reading and writing portion of the test, almost all failed the understanding portion, primarily because white voter registrars had the sole authority to determine if a person understood a section of the constitution. Attempts to get the courts to ban literacy tests were unsuccessful. The U.S. Congress passed the Voting Rights Act of 1965, which prohibited literacy tests in areas that were covered by the law. In 1970, an amendment to the Voting Rights Act banned literacy tests in all fifty states, and another amendment in 1975 permanently banned literacy tests. School Desegregation Before the Civil War, most states prohibited African Americans from getting an education. After the Civil War, schools were established for black education, but on a segregated basis. In many areas, education for African Americans ended at the sixth grade. High schools, vocational schools, and colleges and universities were often unavailable for black students. In 1890, the Louisiana legislature passed a Jim Crow law requiring “separate but equal” accommodations for white and black passengers on the railroads. The railroads backed a challenge to the law because of the additional expense they would encounter. Homer Plessy, one-eighth black, was selected to test the law; he sat in the whites-only coach and was arrested. In Plessy v. Ferguson (1896), in a 7-1 decision, the U.S. Supreme Court upheld the Louisiana law. The Court found no violation of the “equal protection clause” of the Fourteenth Amendment because whites were as separated from blacks as blacks were from whites. Al-

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though the Plessy decision had nothing to do with education, the doctrine of “separate but equal” was quickly adopted to justify segregated schools. The NAACP led the legal attack against segregated schools. The first strategy of the organization was not to seek to overturn Plessy but, on the contrary, to seek enforcement of Plessy. African American schools were indeed “separate,” but were they “equal”? Black schools received far fewer dollars per student to operate, and black teachers were paid a fraction of what white teachers received. Black schools had a limited curriculum, few textbooks, no transportation for students, and often the buildings were no more than one-room shacks. In a series of Supreme Court cases involving higher education in the South, the NAACP time and again demonstrated that black schools were not equal. In fact, in many of the cases, there were no law schools or professional schools available to African Americans. The Supreme Court consistently ordered the enrollment of black students where “separate but equal” was not being met. Challenging “Separate but Equal” By the late 1940’s, the NAACP was ready to mount a direct challenge to Plessy v. Ferguson. Cases were brought in South Carolina, Delaware, Virginia, Kansas, and the District of Columbia. In 1954 the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Plessy and the “separate but equal” doctrine in Brown v. Board of Education. Chief Justice Earl Warren, speaking for a unanimous Court, wrote: “We conclude that in the field of public education the doctrine of ‘separate but equal’ has no place. Separate educational facilities are inherently unequal.” Many southern states invoked the doctrine of states’ rights and argued that the federal government was usurping the power of states to control education. Massive resistance to the court’s decision became the standard policy throughout the South. Some school districts closed their schools rather than integrate, while other communities exploded in violence. When a large, unruly mob prevented the integration of Central High School in Little Rock, Arkansas, President Dwight D. Eisenhower was forced to send in federal troops to protect the nine black students.

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Token integration was the policy during the 1960’s, but in 1969 the U.S. Supreme Court finally declared that the time for delay was over. Fifteen years after Brown, the Court declared that school districts were ordered to comply “at once” with the Brown decision. School districts increasingly relied upon busing as the means to desegregate the schools, and opponents of busing in both the North and South argued that it was leading to the destruction of neighborhood schools. Direct Action On December 1, 1955, a racial incident in Montgomery, Alabama, transformed the face of the Civil Rights movement. On that day, Rosa Parks, a black seamstress, refused to give up her seat on a Montgomery bus to a white passenger. Parks was arrested, and her arrest ushered in the Civil Rights movement. African Americans, led by a new resident to the community, the Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr., organized one of the most effective mass movements and boycotts in the nation’s history, a boycott of the city’s bus system. Almost a year after the boycott began, Montgomery officials reluctantly desegregated the bus system after a decision from the Supreme Court. King emerged from the bus boycott as a national political figure, and in 1957, he and his supporters established the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC). Combining his Christian beliefs with the precepts of nonviolent resistance, King led several mass protest movements against what he perceived to be the moral injustices of a segregated society. In 1963, King wrote his famous “Letter from Birmingham Jail,” in which he outlined his views on just and unjust laws. That same year, King led more than 200,000 civil rights supporters on a March on Washington, D.C. In 1965, King led one of the last major protests of the Civil Rights movement when he and his supporters marched from Selma to Montgomery, Alabama, to pressure Congress to pass a voting rights bill. Another significant phase of the Civil Rights movement was characterized by “sit-ins.” Triggered by four black college students seeking service at the “white” lunch counter of the local Woolworth’s in Greensboro, North Carolina, within days similar sit-ins

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took place in more than sixty communities. Two months after the sit-in started in Greensboro, the lunch counters were integrated. Many of the student leaders in the sit-in movement came together in 1960 and established the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC). SNCC played a major role in voter registration drives throughout the South. By the mid-1960’s, tired of the violence against them and the slow pace of change, SNCC became one of the most militant of the civil rights organizations and a key exponent of “black power.” In 1960, the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) initiated the “Freedom Rides.” Thirteen riders—some white, some black— boarded buses in Washington, D.C., on a trip through the heart of the deep South. Attacked and viciously beaten by white mobs outside Anniston, Alabama, and in Birmingham, the Freedom Riders focused the attention of the nation on the failure of southern states to protect passengers in interstate travel. Realizing the difficulties African Americans experienced in seeking service in public accommodations such as hotels, restaurants, and theaters, Congress passed the landmark Civil Rights Act of 1964, which made it illegal to discriminate in public accommodations on grounds of “race, color, religion or national origin.” Another section of the law banned discrimination in employment and established the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) to enforce the law. The section on employment discrimination established “affirmative action,” an approach that has been blamed by some for eroding white support for the Civil Rights movement. The Collapse of the Civil Rights Movement After 1965, the Civil Rights movement fell into disarray and decline. There were numerous reasons for the decline of the movement. To begin with, the broad base of public support for civil rights began to erode. Many Americans believed that Congress had passed enough legislation to deal with the problem of discrimination (most notably the sweeping 1964 Civil Rights Act) and that now it was time to let those laws work. Another factor was the nationalization of the push for civil rights. Until the mid1960’s the civil rights issue was widely viewed as a southern

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problem. When the movement moved northward, some white northerners withdrew their support. With the institution of busing for school desegregation and the attempt to integrate housing, many white Americans in the North felt threatened. The controversy over affirmative action policies also divided support for the movement. To many Americans, affirmative action meant quotas and programs that unfairly threatened their own job security. Another factor was the diffusion of the movement as it was broadened to include discrimination based on age, gender, physical disability, and sexual orientation. Fewer Americans were willing to support what they viewed as special privileges for women, people with disabilities, and homosexuals than to support civil rights, particularly voting rights, for African Americans. The urban riots of the 1960’s shattered white support for civil rights. White voters and politicians—President Lyndon B. Johnson among them—felt betrayed by the riots. They thought that the nation was trying to deal with the problems of racism and discrimination. Congress had passed three civil rights laws and one voting rights law within an eight-year period. When the Watts

One of the most dramatic moments in the Civil Rights movement was the August, 1963, March on Washington. (Library of Congress)

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riot in Los Angeles broke out within a week after passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, the “white backlash” against civil rights essentially brought the movement to a halt. The riots represented the chasm that still existed between black and white, and they frightened many whites into thinking of “law and order” first and civil rights gains second. On the national scene, the escalating war in Vietnam drew attention away from the Civil Rights movement. When Martin Luther King, Jr., openly opposed the war, he was widely criticized by many civil rights leaders, as well as by President Johnson. In the late 1960’s, the Vietnam War displaced the issue of civil rights. Ideological disputes among black leaders of the movement also led to its collapse. Major disputes arose among civil rights organizations such as the NAACP, SCLC, CORE, and SNCC with respect to tactics and objectives. Younger African Americans, particularly those in SNCC, were dismayed by the slow pace of change and, as a result, favored more militant tactics. The emergence of the Black Power movement in 1966, led by young leaders such as Stokely Carmichael of SNCC, was a direct assault on the approach of King and other moderates. Accomplishments The Civil Rights movement forever altered the political landscape of the United States. Perhaps the greatest accomplishment of the movement can be seen in the thousands of African Americans who hold elective office. The number of black members of Congress was at a record high in the mid-1990’s. African Americans have been elected to virtually every political office in all areas of the country. The Civil Rights movement also ended the humiliating practice of segregation and abolished the laws which attempted to create two classes of citizens. Finally, the Civil Rights movement created a sense of pride and self-esteem among those who participated in the movement. Darryl Paulson Further Reading Good overviews of the Civil Rights movement include Michael J. Klarman’s From Jim Crow to Civil Rights: The Supreme Court

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and the Struggle for Racial Equality (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004), Fred Powledge’s Free at Last? The Civil Rights Movement and the People Who Made It (Boston: Little, Brown, 1991), and Robert Weisbrot’s Freedom Bound: A History of America’s Civil Rights Movement (New York: Plume, 1991). An excellent source on the major barriers to black voting and the struggle to overturn those barriers is Steven Lawson’s Black Ballots: Voting Rights in the South, 1944-1969 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1976). On school desegregation, the best single source is Richard Kluger’s Simple Justice: The History of Brown v. Board of Education and Black America’s Struggle for Equality (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1976). The legislative battle over the Civil Rights Act of 1964 is splendidly told in Charles and Barbara Whalen’s The Longest Debate (Washington, D.C.: Seven Locks Press, 1985). The major civil rights organizations are described in Clayborne Carson’s In Struggle: SNCC and the Black Awakening of the 1960’s (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1981) and Taylor Branch’s Parting the Waters: America in the King Years, 1954-63 (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1988). A definitive biography of a key figure in the Civil Rights movement is Barbara Ransby’s Ella Baker and the Black Freedom Movement: A Radical Democratic Vision (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2003). See also Birmingham March; Black church; Black Power movement; Chicago sit-ins; Church bombings; Civil Rights movement and children; Civil rights worker murders; Congress of Racial Equality; Freedom Rides; Greensboro sit-ins; “I Have a Dream” speech; Jews and African Americans; King assassination; Little Rock school desegregation crisis; Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party; Montgomery bus boycott; National Association for the Advancement of Colored People; National Urban League; Rainbow Coalition; School desegregation; Sit-ins; Southern Christian Leadership Conference; Southern Manifesto; Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee; Summit Meeting of National Negro Leaders; United States Commission on Civil Rights; University of Mississippi desegregation; Voting Rights Act of 1965; White Citizens’ Councils

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Civil Rights movement and children In the course of the struggle to obtain civil rights, African American children were beaten, clubbed, gassed, threatened by lynch mobs, attacked by police dogs, blasted by high-power water hoses, arrested, jailed, and even killed. Many African American children—from the very young to teenagers—were involved in the Civil Rights movement of the 1950’s and 1960’s in the United States. They participated in marches, demonstrations, boycotts, pickets, sit-ins, desegregation of schools, voter registration campaigns, and freedom rides. Some children accompanied their activist parents to organizing meetings, which were often held in black churches and conducted by members of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), the Council of Federated Organizations (COFO), and other civil rights organizations. The children were primarily involved in the movement in the South, especially Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia, Tennessee, Arkansas, and Florida, where both de jure (by law) and de facto (by custom) segregation existed. Although the movement was nonviolent, it elicited violent acts from angry white mobs who gathered around protests, local authorities trying to break up demonstrations and arrest protesters, and racist groups who bombed churches and attacked African Americans in an effort to intimidate them. In the course of the struggle to obtain civil rights, African American children were beaten, clubbed, gassed, threatened by lynch mobs, attacked by police dogs, blasted by high-power water hoses, arrested, jailed, and even killed. In May of 1963, in Birmingham, Alabama, thousands of children marched for civil rights as part of the Children’s Crusade. Birmingham police commissioner Eugene “Bull” Connor, a staunch segregationist, gave the order for police to attack the children with nightsticks, police dogs, and high-power water hoses. The police arrested the children, filling the city jails and then im-

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prisoning children in a makeshift jail at the fairgrounds. In September, 1963, a bomb exploded in the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, killing four young girls who had been attending Sunday school. The church had been selected as a target because civil rights activists gathered there and organized protests. Children also played an important, and difficult, role in school desegregation. Their parents filed lawsuits on their behalf, but it was the children who attended these schools who bore the brunt of racially motivated attacks, verbal and physical abuse, and social isolation. Two of the nationally publicized cases occurred in Topeka, Kansas, and Little Rock, Arkansas. Topeka operated eighteen public elementary schools for white children only and four schools for black children. The Reverend Oliver Brown, on behalf of his daughter Linda Carol Brown, and twelve other black plaintiffs, on behalf of their children, filed a lawsuit to protest this segregation. After much expert testimony, the U.S. Supreme Court in 1954 issued a landmark decision that ended segregation of children in public schools solely on the basis of race, because segregation deprived minority children of equal educational opportunities. In 1957, nine black youths (known as “the Little Rock Nine”), led by Daisy Bates, desegregated Little Rock’s Central High School. President Dwight D. Eisenhower had to use state troopers to protect the children from physical violence by armed white adults opposed to desegregation. Bernice McNair Barnett See also Brown v. Board of Education; Civil Rights movement; Little Rock school desegregation crisis; School desegregation; Segregation

Civil Rights Restoration Act The Law: Federal legislation devised to clarify earlier mandates regarding the funding of educational institutions Date: March 22, 1988

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Congress required recipients of federal financial assistance to uphold nondiscriminatory requirements of the 1964 and subsequent civil rights legislation in all respects, not merely in activity aided by federal funds. Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 mandated that federal funds could not be used to support segregation or discrimination based on race, color, or national origin. The law did not affect a number of other civil rights problems, however. At Cornell University’s School of Agriculture, for example, women could not gain admission unless their entrance exam scores were 30 percent to 40 percent higher than those of male applicants. Epileptics were often barred from employment, and persons in their fifties were often told that they were qualified for a job but too old. To rectify these problems, Congress extended the scope of unlawful discrimination in federally assisted schools in Title IX of the Education Amendments Act of 1972 to cover gender; the Rehabilitation Act of 1973 expanded the same coverage to people with disabilities; and the Age Discrimination Act of 1975 added age as a protected class. Enforcement of the statute regarding education was initially assigned to the Office for Civil Rights (OCR) of the U.S. Department of Health, Education, and Welfare, which later became the U.S. Department of Education. OCR ruled that the statute outlawed not only discrimination in the particular program supported by federal funds but also discrimination in programs supported by nonfederal funds. All recipients of federal financial assistance were asked to sign an assurance of compliance with OCR as a condition of receiving a federal grant. Grove City College From 1974 to 1984, Grove City College in western Pennsylvania received $1.8 million in tuition grants and guaranteed student loans but refused to sign an assurance of compliance. The college argued that the funds were for students, not the college, but OCR insisted that the financial aid was administered as a part of the college’s financial aid program and, therefore, the college must pledge as a whole not to discriminate on the basis of race, color,

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national origin, or gender. OCR instituted enforcement proceedings against Grove City College, and an administrative law judge ruled in 1978 that the college could no longer receive federal student loan moneys. Grove City College and four students desiring financial aid then sued. In 1980, when the case was first tried, the federal district court ruled in favor of Grove City College on the grounds that no sex discrimination had actually occurred. On appeal, the court of appeals reversed the lower court’s decision, and the matter was taken up by the Supreme Court of the United States, this time with Terrel H. Bell, head of the newly created federal Department of Education, as the defendant. In Grove City College v. Bell (1984), Justice Byron R. White delivered the majority opinion of the Court, which held that OCR did not have sufficient congressional authority to withhold funds from Grove City College for failure to sign the assurance of compliance. Moreover, according to the Court, violations of Title VI could occur only in the specific program or activity supported directly with federal funds, a judgment that went beyond the question raised by the case. Justices William J. Brennan, Jr., and Thurgood Marshall dissented. A New Bill Shortly after the Supreme Court ruling, OCR dropped some seven hundred pending enforcement actions, resulting in an outcry from civil rights groups over the decision. Representative Augustus F. Hawkins authored the Civil Rights Restoration Act in the House, and Senator Ted Kennedy sponsored the bill in the Senate. Their aim was to amend all the affected statutes—Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, Title IX of the Education Amendments Act of 1972, the Rehabilitation Act of 1973, and the Age Discrimination Act of 1975. According to the bill, any agency or private firm that wanted to receive federal financial assistance would have to comply with the nondiscrimination requirement as a whole, even if the aid went to only one subunit of that agency or firm. Although Hawkins’s version quickly passed in the House of Representatives, the measure was caught up in the politics of

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abortion, and the bill died in the Senate. Opponents advanced more than one thousand amendments over a period of four years, and representatives of the administration of President Ronald Reagan testified against passage of the law. A group known as the Moral Majority broadcast warnings that the bill would protect alcoholics, drug addicts, and homosexuals from discrimination, although there were no such provisions in the proposal. More crucially, the Catholic Conference of Bishops, which was traditionally aligned with the Civil Rights movement, wanted two amendments to the bill. One proposed amendment, which was unsuccessful, would have exempted institutions affiliated with religious institutions from complying with the law if religious views would be compromised thereby. The other proposed amendment, which was opposed by the National Organization for Women, was an assurance that no federal funds would be spent on abortion. Congress delayed finding a compromise. In 1987, leaving out references to abortion, Congress finally adopted the Civil Rights Restoration Act. By vetoing the measure, Reagan became the first president to veto a civil rights bill since Andrew Johnson. Supporters of the act sought to override the presidential veto. Opponents in the Senate tried to destroy the bill by various amendments in debate on the floor of the Senate on January 28, 1988. Senator John C. Danforth proposed an amendment that would disallow federal payments for abortion. This amendment passed. With the passage of the act by the Senate on March 22, 1988, Congress overrode Reagan’s veto, and the law went into effect immediately. Michael Haas Further Reading The law is explained and analyzed in Veronica M. Gillespie and Gregory L. McClinton’s “The Civil Rights Restoration Act of 1987: A Defeat for Judicial Conservatism” in National Black Law Journal (12, Spring, 1990), Robert K. Robinson, Billie Morgan Allen, and Geralyn McClure Franklin’s “The Civil Rights Restoration Act of 1987: Broadening the Scope of Civil Rights Legisla-

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tion” in Labor Law Journal (40, January, 1989), and Robert Watson’s “Effects of the Civil Rights Restoration Act of 1987 upon Private Organizations and Religious Institutions” in Capital University Law Review (18, Spring, 1989). Mark Willen’s “Congress Overrides Reagan’s Grove City Veto” in Congressional Quarterly Weekly Review (46, March 26, 1988) explains the parliamentary maneuvers required to get the law passed. See also Affirmative action; Civil Rights Act of 1964; Education

Civil rights worker murders The Event: A group of white supremacists attacked and murdered three civil rights workers Date: June-July, 1964 Place: Nashoba County, Mississippi The murders brought profound changes to the Deep South generally and to Nashoba County, specifically. Eventually, those directly involved were tried and convicted, and the cause for which the three men died, black enfranchisement, became a reality. The struggle for black equality reached its crest in the two years after the August, 1963, March on Washington. During that period, the last elements of legal segregation died. More important, black disfranchisement, the key to maintaining the old, dual system of life in the South, also ended. The registration and enfranchisement of African Americans came, however, at a heavy cost: Three young civil rights workers were killed for their efforts to give the right to vote to those who had been denied it since the end of Reconstruction in the 1870’s. The murders of James Earl Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Michael Henry Schwerner focused international attention on the Civil Rights movement and brought a commitment from the federal government to bring to justice those responsible for the crime. After judicial decisions had ended the tradition of separate schools and facilities in the South, civil rights organizations turned their attention to registering African Americans as voters. Be-

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lieving that access to the ballot box was the key to empowering the dispossessed, organizations such as the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) and the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) sought to organize massive voter registration drives in the Deep South. Mississippi In particular, leaders targeted the state of Mississippi, the poorest and least literate in the nation. During the winter of 19631964, the Council of Federated Organizations (COFO), a confederation of civil rights organizations, planned for the Mississippi Freedom Summer, which had as its goal the registration of as many African Americans as possible. More than one thousand white college students volunteered to spend their summer organizing community centers and teaching reading, writing, and civics to rural African Americans who wanted to become voters. In the area of Nashoba County, Mississippi, COFO’s plans were unpopular with most white citizens. For the first time since the end of Reconstruction, the national Ku Klux Klan organized local klaverns in the area. Michael Schwerner, a graduate of Cornell University, and his wife had moved to Meridian, Mississippi, during the winter to begin the preparations for the Freedom Summer. A committed believer in racial equality, Schwerner quickly became a target for the white supremacists of Nashoba County. Various plans to eliminate him were discussed in Klan meetings. James Chaney was a native of the area and had become a paid COFO staff member a few months before he was murdered. Andrew Goodman was one of the Freedom Summer volunteers who was scheduled to work in Nashoba County. He arrived in the area on June 20 and was killed one day later. Background to the Murders The events surrounding the murder of the three civil rights workers began on June 16, when a group of armed white men beat the lay leaders of the Mount Zion Methodist Church in Longdale, a small, all-black community in Nashoba County. Later that night, several of the whites returned and set fire to the

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church, which was to have housed one of the Freedom Schools. On June 21, Chaney, Goodman, and Schwerner drove to Longdale from Meridian to examine the church’s remains. On their return from Nashoba County, Deputy Sheriff Cecil Ray Price stopped their car for speeding. After arresting Chaney for driving sixty-five miles per hour in a thirty-five mile per hour zone, Price arrested Goodman and Schwerner for suspicion of arson in the Mount Zion church fire. He then placed the three in the Nashoba County jail, where they remained for more than five hours. At about the time that the three were placed in jail, COFO was activating its procedures for locating field workers who had not returned or phoned by 4:00 p.m. In addition to telephoning all of the area hospitals, COFO staff placed calls to all the jails. When the Nashoba County jail was called by the Meridian COFO office, however, the person who answered the phone flatly denied having seen any of the three. While Chaney, Goodman, and Schwerner were in the jail, Price, a member of the White Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, notified his Klan superiors and made arrangements for the elimination of the troublemakers. Specifically, leaders of the local klavern located a bulldozer operator and arranged for him to dispose of the three men’s bodies even before they were released from jail. Several years later, it became known that the murder plan was finalized before the three were released from the jail that evening. The Murders Sometime after 10:00 p.m., Deputy Price allowed Chaney to pay a twenty dollar fine for speeding and prepared to release all three men. None was permitted to make a phone call, and all three knew that a release after dark was dangerous. Price escorted the three to their car and directed them to leave Nashoba County. On the drive back toward Meridian, a high-speed car chase began as Chaney, Goodman, and Schwerner raced for the county line. They did not make it. Price stopped their car again and ordered the three into his car as the rest of the Klan posse arrived. The three cars—Price’s, the posse’s, and the COFO car, driven by a Klansman—proceeded to a deserted dirt road. Once off the main road, Schwerner and Goodman were pulled from

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the car and shot through the heart at point-blank range. Before Chaney was killed, he was beaten severely with a blackjack. He was shot three times, with the third shot fired into his brain. The bodies of the three were carried to a remote farm, where a cattle pond was under construction. The bodies were dumped into a prepared hole in the fresh earthen dam, and the COFO station wagon was driven in the opposite direction and burned. Reactions to the Murders The reaction to the disappearance of the three was swift. On June 22, U.S. Attorney General Robert Kennedy ordered a fullscale inquiry by the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI). Following the discovery of the burned car on June 23, President Lyndon B. Johnson authorized the use of two hundred men from the Meridian naval air station to aid in the search. Within Nashoba County, popular belief held that the three were hiding in an attempt to arouse northern sympathy for their work. Some even argued that COFO was responsible for the arson at the Mount Zion church, using it to complete the hoax effect. J. Edgar Hoover, director of the FBI, flew to the area on July 10, at the president’s request, to investigate the disappearances personally. At a press conference in Jackson, Mississippi, Hoover disclosed that the FBI force in the state had been increased to 153 agents—more than ten times the normal number—to protect civil rights workers. On August 5, the bodies of Chaney, Goodman, and Schwerner were unearthed from the new dam. Despite autopsies that unequivocally showed that Goodman and Schwerner had been shot to death and that Chaney had suffered an “inhuman beating” before dying from three gunshot wounds, a Nashoba County coroner’s jury ruled on August 25 that it was unable to determine the cause of death for any of the three. On December 4, Hoover announced the arrests of nineteen men on federal conspiracy charges in connection with the murders, including Price and his superior, the Nashoba County sheriff. The FBI focused on the role of the Klan in the deaths, and more than 60 agents infiltrated the Mississippi Klan to obtain evidence. More than 1,000 Mississippians, including 480 Klan members, were interviewed during the investigation.

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Impact The murders of James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Michael Schwerner brought profound changes to the Deep South generally and to Nashoba County, Mississippi, specifically. Eventually, those directly involved were tried and convicted, and the cause for which the three men died, black enfranchisement, became a reality. When the 1964 Nashoba County Fair opened six days after the bodies had been recovered, the mood was subdued and tense. Arizona senator Barry Goldwater, the Republican nominee for president, canceled a planned appearance at the event, even though it had been an obligatory stop for politicians in the past. The discovery of the corpses also ended most of the discussions of a COFO-arranged hoax. Instead, the FBI used the discovery as a lever to secure information from Klansmen who mistrusted each other and feared arrest in the case. Since the FBI learned the precise location of the bodies, it was clear that agents were receiving very reliable information. A number of those involved suspected that more than just the burial location had been passed to the federal government, and the Klan’s code of silence was broken as several sought to save themselves by cooperating with the investigation. Using laws passed as part of the Civil Rights Act of 1870, the federal government obtained grand jury indictments charging those involved with conspiracy to deny Chaney, Goodman, and Schwerner their civil rights. No substantive local investigation of the crime ever took place, and no murder charges were ever filed by the state of Mississippi. On October 20, 1967, a federal jury in Meridian convicted Cecil Ray Price and six codefendants of the charges, marking the first successful prosecution in Mississippi history of white officials and Klansmen for crimes against African Americans or civil rights workers. After unsuccessful appeals, all the defendants entered federal custody on March 19, 1970, five and one-half years after the three murders. The impact on the fight for civil rights was less clear. On July 2, 1964, Congress enacted the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which prohibited discrimination in public accommodations, publicly

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owned facilities, federally funded programs, and union membership. It also created the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission to end discrimination in employment. In November, 1964, Lyndon Johnson won a landslide reelection, capturing 61 percent of the popular vote and 94 percent of the African American vote. Two million more African Americans voted in that election than had in 1960. Following the discovery of the bodies and the revelation that Chaney had been beaten before his murder, unlike Schwerner and Goodman, the trend toward self-segregation within the Civil Rights movement came to the fore. Some African Americans had come to believe that they needed to lead their own fight and that whites could not be part of it. As the 1960’s progressed, these differences of opinion within the Civil Rights movement became more acute, and the movement became more diffuse as a result. Some, like Martin Luther King, Jr., rejected the idea of a movement for racial equality practicing segregation within itself. Others, like the leadership of SNCC, assumed a more radical position and eventually expelled all nonblacks from its projects. By then, enfranchisement for all was no longer a dream but instead a reality, and the Civil Rights movement was a success in ending legal segregation. E. A. Reed Further Reading Branch, Taylor. Pillar of Fire: America in the King Years, 1963-65. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1998. Cagin, Seth, and Philip Dray. We Are Not Afraid. New York: Macmillan, 1988. This is the best one-volume work on the Mississippi murders, the result of research into oral histories, court transcripts, and investigators’ files. Annotated, with a complete index. Grimshaw, Allen D., ed. Racial Violence in the United States. Chicago: Aldine, 1969. One of the most comprehensive anthologies on racial violence. Covers American history beginning with seventeenth century slave revolts and running through the riots of the 1960’s. Contains a complete bibliography and index.

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Leuchtenburg, William F. A Troubled Feast: American Society Since 1945. Boston: Little, Brown, 1973. A valuable, brief volume that provides a balanced introduction to recent American history. The Civil Rights movement is discussed within the context of broader social movements of the era. Contains a list of suggested readings and an index. Lewis, Anthony. Portrait of a Decade: The Second American Revolution. New York: Random House, 1964. One of the seminal books on American race relations in the 1950’s and early 1960’s, this single volume examines the origins and manifestations of the disagreements over civil rights through analyses and excerpts from both the popular and the scholarly press. Contains an index. McClymer, John F., ed. Mississippi Freedom Summer. Belmont, Calif.: Thomson/Wadsworth, 2003. New study of the summer in which the Civil Rights movement achieved its greatest triumphs. Mars, Florence. Witness in Philadelphia. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1977. This first-person account of the events in Nashoba County, as told by a white woman, provides valuable insight into life before, during, and after the murders, the investigation, and the federal prosecution. Although not scholarly, it yields a textured view of the events that is valuable for those who want to understand better how such an event could have happened. Contains annotations, an index, and photographs. Marsh, Charles. God’s Long Summer: Stories of Faith and Civil Rights. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1997. Sitkoff, Harvard. The Struggle for Black Equality, 1954-1980. New York: Hill & Wang, 1981. One of the best books for an overview of the American Civil Rights movement. This volume places the various elements of the movement into an understandable context for nonspecialists. Biographical essay and index. See also Civil Rights movement; Freedom Summer; Harlins murder; Hawkins murder; King assassination; Malcolm X assassination; Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee; Till lynching

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Civil War The Event: War between Northern and Southern states that established the primacy of the federal government over the states in the administration of justice and elevated the ethical system of free-labor capitalism as the national standard Date: 1861-1865 The war’s most profound effects on race relations in the United States resulted from its ending of slavery and emancipation of enslaved African Americans. The Civil War redefined relationships both between the U.S. government and the individual and between the federal and state governments. During the course of the conflict, the Union and Confederate governments pursued aggressively nationalistic policies that undermined states’ rights, civil liberties, and property rights. The Slavery Issue By the mid-nineteenth century, the free-labor ideal had taken hold in the states of the North. It was believed that economic opportunity should be open to all. To many in the North, the slave system in the South appeared to be the antithesis of the free-labor ideal. Northerners believed that slavery was inefficient, that it degraded labor as a whole, and that it created economic stagnation. Though most were willing to tolerate slavery where it existed, they wanted the western territories reserved for free white labor. They interpreted the Constitution as a document that made freedom national and slavery local. Southerners shared a belief in the positive benefits of economic opportunity, but they identified it with the acquisition of land and slaves. Southerners dreamed of extending the slave system into the territories, arguing that the territories were the common property of all Americans; to prohibit slavery within them deprived southern people of their right to share in the nation’s bounty. The Republican victory in 1860 brought to power an administration pledged to restrict slavery in the territories. Fearing that

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the new administration would undermine slavery, seven southern states asserted their right to secede from the federal union and form a new government. Abraham Lincoln’s administration denied the right of secession and refused to relinquish federal property in the South to the new Confederacy. When the state of South Carolina fired on a federal fort in Charleston harbor, President Lincoln called upon the states to supply troops to suppress the rebellion and preserve the federal union. Four additional states believed Lincoln’s action to be an unjust usurpation of federal power and joined the Confederacy. For the Lincoln administration, the highest good was the preservation of the Union. All issues of justice were considered in relation to that objective. The Confederacy was dedicated to the proposition that human property was an unalienable right and must be preserved. For the first year of fighting, the Lincoln administration took no action to destroy slavery. It enforced the provisions

Slavery in the United States at the Beginning of the Civil War (1861) W as ng hi

ton ry

Iowa

Colorado Territory

Illinois

California

Kansas

Maine

tt se hu New sac s a York M Rhode Pe Island nns ylvania Connecticut New Jersey Delaware Virginia Maryland s

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New Hampshire

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i ch

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Dakota Territory

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Nevada Territory

ory Territ

Oregon

Ohio

Missouri Kentucky

ssi

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Slave states controlled by the Union

sia

North Carolina S Ca outh rol ina Georgia

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Free Union states

ui Lo

Texas

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Slave states in the Confederacy Free territories under Union control Free territories aligned with the Confederacy

Source: Adapted from Eric Foner and John A. Garraty, eds., The Reader’s Companion to American History. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1991.

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of the Fugitive Slave Law, and Lincoln rebuked Union general John C. Frémont when he issued a proclamation freeing the slaves of Confederate sympathizers in Missouri. Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation did not take effect until January 1, 1863. When he issued the proclamation, Lincoln justified his action in terms of military necessity. The proclamation freed only the slaves behind Confederate lines, but after the Emancipation Proclamation was issued, the Union army became a force for liberation. Civil Liberties Both the Union and Confederate governments restricted traditional civil liberties during the conflict. In early 1862, the Confederate Congress authorized Confederate president Jefferson Davis to suspend the writ of habeas corpus and to declare martial law in areas in danger of attack. That same year, President Davis ordered the first military draft in North America and established a Conscription Bureau to carry it out. Even more striking, the Confederacy never established a Supreme Court and allowed their attorney general to judge the constitutionality of laws. That omission seriously undermined the notion of judicial independence and gave the executive branch unprecedented powers over the administration of justice. Thousands of civilians were arrested by the Union government during the war, and many were tried by military courts. In response to civil disturbances in Baltimore, Lincoln suspended the privilege of habeas corpus on April 27, 1861, along the rail line from Philadelphia to Washington. The suspension was later extended to other areas of the North and gradually became general in certain types of cases. Most military arrested by the Union government were not political. The vast majority of civilian prisoners were blockaderunners, residents of Confederate states, army deserters, draft dodgers, foreign nationals, people who dealt in contraband goods, or fraudulent war contractors. A loyal opposition continued to function in the North throughout the war and actually won control of several state legislatures. Among those arrested early in the war was John Merryman. Merryman was a member of a pro-Confederate Maryland cav-

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alry unit that had damaged railroad bridges in April, 1861. Merryman’s attorney successfully petitioned a federal circuit court for a writ of habeas corpus to show just cause for his arrest. The commander of Fort McHenry, where Merryman was being held, refused to honor the writ on the grounds that President Lincoln had suspended the privilege in Maryland. Judge Roger B. Taney responded by issuing a circuit court ruling stating that only the Congress had the power to exercise such a suspension (Ex parte Merryman, 1861). In spite of the ruling, Lincoln continued to maintain his right to suspend the writ as an essential power necessary to suppress the rebellion. For purposes of election propaganda, unscrupulous Republican politicians and military officers attempted to exploit fears that traitorous secret organizations existed in the Midwest. Recent scholarship has demonstrated that the major “Copperhead” societies, such as the Knights of the Golden Circle and the Sons of Liberty, were little more than paper tigers. In the wake of Democratic victories in the state elections of 1862, Republican newspaper editors frequently printed tales of treasonable Democratic activities. When Ohio Democrat Clement L. Vallandigham declared that the war was being fought to free blacks and enslave whites, General Ambrose Burnside ordered his arrest. A military commission convicted Vallandigham of attempting to hamper the government’s efforts to suppress the rebellion and recommended imprisonment. President Lincoln altered the sentence to banishment, and Vallandigham was escorted to Confederate lines. Lincoln justified his action by arguing that it made no sense to shoot a simple-minded deserter and do nothing to the man who induced him to desert. Later in the war, Democratic activist H. H. Dodd of Indiana organized the Sons of Liberty to protect the civil liberties of those opposed to the Republican administration. Acting on rumors that the Sons of Liberty had aided Confederates, Union general Henry Carrington arrested Indiana Democrats linked to the Sons of Liberty, including editor Lambdin Milligan. A military commission sentenced three of the defendants to death. Others received prison terms. The death sentences were never carried out, but it is

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clear that the men were tried on questionable evidence by military commissions in areas where civil courts were functioning. After the war, the Supreme Court ruled in Ex parte Milligan (1866) that such trials were illegal. Treatment of Black Troops When the conflict began, neither the Union nor Confederate governments would sanction the use of African American soldiers. As the Union government moved toward an acceptance of emancipation, however, it also began to organize African American regiments. In spite of the large-scale recruitment of black soldiers during the last two years of the war, the Union army discriminated against African Americans in a wide variety of ways including pay, chance of promotion, and the amount of fatigue duty black units were expected to perform. Although a few African Americans did receive commissions, the vast majority of officers in the United States Colored Troops (USCT) were white combat veter-

After the Union army abandoned its opposition to using black troops in combat, the Fifty-fourth Massachusetts Colored Regiment became one of the most distinguished units of the Civil War. (Library of Congress)

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ans. The men of the USCT proved their courage at the battles of Port Hudson, Milliken’s Bend, and Fort Wagner, where they took heavy casualties. Generally, however, the prejudice of many commanding officers led to the use of USCT regiments for fatigue or guard duty while saving white units for combat. The Confederacy reacted harshly to the use of black troops by the Union army. President Davis approved of the execution of black prisoners of war in South Carolina in November, 1862. Later, Davis ordered that all former slaves captured while serving in the Union army be returned to the states for trial. The massacre of black prisoners by Confederate troops on several occasions forced Union authorities to threaten retaliation in order to stem the injustice. The use of large numbers of black troops by the Union war effort helped pave the way for universal emancipation. Throughout his political career, Lincoln consistently asserted that slavery was morally wrong. Though emancipation began as a military tactic, it became a war aim. The courage of black soldiers allowed Lincoln to secure passage of the Thirteenth Amendment, providing for an end to slavery throughout the country. Military Justice The system of military justice employed within the army was seriously flawed. At least 267 soldiers were executed by the Union army during the Civil War era. More than half of those executed were either foreigners or African Americans. A number of black soldiers were convicted of mutiny for protesting unequal pay in the Union army. Racial tensions accelerated during the final months of the conflict. A high number of black soldiers were executed for alleged sexual offenses against white women. The Confederacy had an incomplete record of military justice. Since many southern officers had received their training in the prewar U.S. Army, the procedural flaws of courts-martial were similar in both armies. The Civil War moved the United States toward a more perfect application of its ideals of equality and justice. The United States entered the war as a federal union with contrasting standards of justice, one based on free-labor ideals, the other on the slave sys-

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Members of the Fourth U.S. Colored Troops at Fort Lincoln, Maryland, at the conclusion of the Civil War. (Library of Congress)

tem of the southern states. Property rights took precedent over human rights, and equal justice was denied African Americans in virtually every section of the country. The Union government, through its policy of emancipation and the enlistment of African Americans into its armed forces, transformed the war from a crusade to preserve the Union into a war of liberation. In doing so, it expanded the nation’s concept of justice to include equality for African Americans. Thomas D. Matijasic Further Reading David W. Blight’s Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2001) and Jeffrey Rogers Hummel’s Emancipating Slaves, Enslaving Free Men: A History of the American Civil War. (Chicago: Open Court, 1996) are valuable additions to the literature on the Civil War. The most comprehensive source for military records on the Civil War is the U.S. War Department’s The War of the Rebellion: A Compilation of the Official Records of the Union and Confederate Armies (130 vols., Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1880-1901). An excellent overview of all aspects of the

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war condensed into readable form is James M. McPherson’s Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988). Robert I. Alotta’s Civil War Justice: Union Army Executions Under Lincoln (Shippensburg, Pa.: White Mane, 1989) argues that the military justice system was hopelessly flawed. Joseph T. Glatthaar’s Forged in Battle: The Civil War Alliance of Black Soldiers and White Officers (New York: The Free Press, 1990) chronicles discrimination within the Union army. Frank L. Klement’s Dark Lanterns: Secret Political Societies, Conspiracies, and Treason Trials in the Civil War (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1984) explodes the myth of vast treasonable societies operating in the North during the war. Mark E. Neely, Jr.’s The Fate of Liberty: Abraham Lincoln and Civil Liberties (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991) defends Lincoln’s record on civil liberties and disputes the notion that arbitrary arrests were common. James G. Randall’s Constitutional Problems Under Lincoln (rev. ed. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1951) blames Lincoln’s subordinates for violations of civil liberties. Emory M. Thomas’s The Confederate Nation: 1861-1865 (New York: Harper & Row, 1979) is a brief, readable overview of the functioning of the Confederate government. See also Bleeding Kansas; Charleston race riots; Civil Rights Acts of 1866-1875; Colfax massacre; Compromise of 1850; Confiscation Acts of 1861 and 1862; Draft riots; Emancipation Proclamation; Fifteenth Amendment; Fourteenth Amendment; Harpers Ferry raid; Kansas-Nebraska Act; Military; Missouri Compromise; Reconstruction; Scott v. Sandford; Thirteenth Amendment; Vietnam War

Clinton massacre The Event: Killing of more than twenty African Americans by angry white mobs Date: September 4-6, 1875 Place: Clinton, Mississippi The Clinton massacre served as the impetus that inspired white Mississippi “redeemers,” as they were called, to do whatever was necessary to take control away from the Republicans and force black submission.

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In 1875, widespread resentment of congressional Reconstruction (the effort to rebuild and rehabilitate the South after the Civil War) mounted among whites in Mississippi. White Democrats began coordinating efforts to carry the fall statewide elections. The dominant issue for Democrats in the 1875 electoral campaign was the threat or fear of race war. Several race riots had already occurred throughout Mississippi during the summer. Democratic political solidarity was still in question, however, until the Clinton massacre of September 4-6. Clinton, a town in Hinds County, was the site of a political rally to which both Democratic and Republican speakers were invited. The rally was disrupted by gunfire, and both black and white people were killed and wounded. Confusion followed. News of the incident quickly spread throughout the state. Bands of armed whites converged on Clinton, and a reign of terror followed. Officials estimated that twenty to fifty African Americans were killed by the angry white mobs. Many African Americans fled to other towns, and some sought refuge in the woods. The Republican governor of Mississippi, unable to convince the president to send troops, watched helplessly as an undeclared race war waged throughout the state. Freedmen were denied access to the polls or were forced to vote for Democratic candidates. The Clinton massacre had served as the spark that inspired white Mississippi “redeemers,” as they were called, to do whatever was necessary to take control away from the Republicans and force black submission. Donald C. Simmons, Jr. See also Colfax massacre; Disfranchisement laws in Mississippi; Dyer antilynching bill; Lynching; Race riots of 1866; Race riots of 1943; Race riots of the twentieth century; Reconstruction

Clotilde capture The Event: Capture of the last ship to deliver slaves to the United States Date: July, 1859 Place: Mobile Bay, Alabama

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The arrest and prosecution of the Clotilde finally ended the illegal slave trade to the United States and brought a symbolic end to slavery.

There are contradictory reports about slavers—ships especially built to transport slaves—during the period from 1858 to 1861. Historians, however, have managed to piece together an accurate account of the Clotilde, the last U.S. slave ship, which smuggled more than a hundred Africans into Alabama. The slave trade was outlawed by Congress in 1808. This brutal business continued without serious interference, however, until the early 1820’s, when federal officials began capturing slavers and freeing their prisoners. Public sentiment, even in the South, did not favor revival of the trade. To annoy northern antislavery and abolitionist advocates, numerous rumors were spread by slave traders and sympathizers about slavers landing on the southeastern coast. For example, the New York Daily Tribune received many letters reporting landings of slavers in Florida and the Carolinas. There were even rumors in the 1860’s of a prosperous underground slave-trading company operating in New Orleans. The Clotilde’s history, however, has been confirmed by eyewitness accounts and careful reconstruction of events by historians. Congress had revived laws against slave trading and declared that anyone convicted would be hanged. The United States had been later than almost every other civilized nation in the world in abolishing slave trading. Even New York City, bastion of abolitionists, became a refuge for eighty-five slave ships, many of them built and sent to Africa from that city. Much profit could be made in the $17,000,000-per-year business. According to one account, 15,000 Africans were smuggled to the United States in 1859 alone, the last 117 of whom were brought by the Clotilde. In contrast, the British government, after issuing its injunction against the slave trade in the eighteenth century, seized and destroyed 625 slave ships and freed their forty thousand prisoners. In the United States, only the abolitionists consistently confronted the government for its apathy toward slave smuggling.

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The Meagher Brothers’ Scheme Timothy Meagher, with brothers Jim and Byrns, masterminded the Clotilde project. An imposing Irishman known for his adventurous character, Timothy Meagher was a plantation owner and captain of the steamboat Roger B. Taney, which carried passengers, cargo, and mail to and from Montgomery on the Alabama River. Apparently in a lighthearted argument with some passengers on his steamboat, Meagher made a thousand-dollar bet that within a year or two he would bring a ship full of slaves to Mobile Bay without being apprehended by federal officials. Meagher had many years’ experience in cruising the Alabama River. He knew his way around every hidden bayou, swamp, canebrake, and sandbar better than anyone else in the South. For his operation, he needed a slave ship. He purchased a lumber schooner called the Clotilde for thirty-five thousand dollars in late 1858 and rebuilt it as a 327-ton slaver. He hired his friend Bill Foster, who was experienced in constructing and sailing the old slavers, as skipper. Foster was to sail to the west coast of Africa and seek the Dahomey kingdom’s assistance in procuring two hundred young slaves. The Clotilde was equipped with a crew, guns, and cutlasses. To control the prisoners, Meagher supplied the ship with iron manacles, rings, and chains. Foster hired his crew from all over the South, enticing them with liquor, money, and promises of adventure. In the dead of night, massive quantities of food, mainly yams and rice, and drinking water were transported to the ship from Meagher’s plantation. To give the ship the look of a lumber schooner, some piles of lumber were placed on the deck. Captain Foster hired the infamous King Dahomey and his drunken thugs to raid villages and capture two hundred young, healthy men and women. The attacks must have taken place early one summer morning in May or early June of 1859. King Dahomey’s band raided the two peaceful villages of Whinney and Ataka. They burned huts, injured women and children, and tied up more than 170 young Africans by their necks. The captives were forced into the hold of the Clotilde. The return trip was an awful scene of helpless people, racked with convulsions, crammed into dark, damp quarters, lacking

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adequate food and water. Foster had as many as thirty-nine bodies thrown overboard before arriving back in the United States. The ship returned in July, 1859, and waited in front of Biloxi in the Mississippi Sound. Foster hired a friend’s tugboat and in the dead of night, pulled the Clotilde, undetected by government vessels present in Mobile Bay, to a prearranged location in the swamps of the Tombigbee River. Meagher was the best man to maneuver the craft in the treacherous bayous. The sick, exhausted Africans were moved quietly to an out-of-the-way plantation belonging to Meagher’s friend, John M. Dabney, who hid them in the canebrakes. From there, Meagher took charge of his steamer, the Roger B. Taney, and kept Foster and the Clotilde crew members hidden aboard her until they reached Montgomery, where they were paid off and whisked to New York City for dispersal. The slaver Clotilde was promptly burned at water’s edge as soon as its African cargo had been removed. Meagher made elaborate preparations to throw townsfolk and government officials off the track. The Department of Justice was informed, however, and Meagher was arrested at his plantation and placed on trial in short order. Meagher’s trial was a sham. He was released on bond for lack of evidence. His efforts to conceal all signs of the ship and its cargo had paid off, but he had to spend close to $100,000 in lawyers’ fees and bribes. The prosecution was delayed, and the secessionists came to his rescue. News of the Clotilde’s landing and Meagher’s trial was drowned by the presidential campaign and widespread talk of civil war. Government officials finally learned where the Africans were hidden. They commissioned the steamer Eclipse for finding and transferring the Africans to Mobile. Meagher, learning of the government’s decision, got the Eclipse crew and government passengers drunk, giving him and his men time to move the prisoners to a friend’s plantation two hundred miles up the Alabama River. Disaster and Aftermath Meagher’s slave-smuggling venture was a financial disaster. He bought the Africans from Dahomey for $8,460 in gold plus ninety casks of rum and some cases of yard goods. He was able to

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sell only twenty-five slaves; it is not clear exactly what happened to the rest. There were reports that Meagher later transferred the others to his plantation near Mobile. Some ended up marrying and living with local black people in the vicinity. Some were reported to have died of disease. Many others settled in cabins behind the Meagher plantation house, which was burned in 1905. In 1906, a journalistic account of the Clotilde episode appeared in Harper’s Monthly magazine. The author, H. M. Byers, had found several soft-spoken Africans who told of having been smuggled aboard the Clotilde. They still maintained some of their own culture and language, along with their African gentleness of demeanor. Most of their children were married to local black residents of Mobile and neighboring areas. Byers conducted extensive interviews with two who had endured the journey from Africa to Alabama: an old man named Gossalow, who had a tribal tattoo on his breast, and an old woman named Abaky, who had intricate tribal tattoos on both cheeks. Gossalow and his wife had been stolen from the village of Whinney, and Abaky from the town of Ataka, near King Dahomey’s land. They had kept many of their old traditions in their original form with little modification. For example, they still buried their dead in graves filled with oak leaves. They spoke nostalgically of their peaceful West African farms, planted with abundant yams and rice. Chogollah Maroufi Further Reading Byers, H. M. “The Last Slave Ship.” Harper’s Monthly Magazine 53 (1906): 742-746. A sensationalized journalistic version of the episode, but filled with valuable and accurate details. Especially valuable are the author’s interviews with two surviving Africans who were smuggled into the United States aboard the Clotilde. Howard, Warren S. “The Elusive Smuggled Slave.” In American Slavers and the Federal Law: 1837-1862. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1963. Provides various accounts of the Clotilde. Klein, Herbert S. The Atlantic Slave Trade. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1999.

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Sellers, James Benson. Slavery in Alabama. Birmingham: University of Alabama Press, 1950. Conveys the historical and social mood of that period and gives some details of the Clotilde’s smuggling operation. Spear, John R. The American Slave Trade: An Account of Its Origins, Growth, and Suppression. Williamstown, Mass.: Corner House, 1978. A well-researched and thoroughly documented book about the slave trade in general. Chapter 19 provides an account of the Clotilde voyage and its aftermath. Thomas, Hugh. The Slave Trade: The Story of the Atlantic Slave Trade, 1440-1870. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1997. Wish, Harvey. “The Revival of the African Slave Trade in the United States, 1859-1860.” Mississippi Valley Historical Review 27 (1940-1941): 569-588. A comprehensive account of various smuggling operations just before the Civil War. See also Abolition; Amistad slave revolt; Slavery

Colfax massacre The Event: Killing of more than sixty African Americans by a white terrorist organization Date: April 13, 1873 Place: Colfax, Louisiana Fighting for political rights, more than sixty African Americans died in what was the bloodiest single case of racial violence during the Reconstruction. Afterward, President Ulysses S. Grant ignored pleas for justice on behalf of the slain. The terrorist group known as the White League formed across Louisiana during the Reconstruction (1866-1877) to keep African Americans out of the political arena. The league’s activities led to the Colfax massacre, the bloodiest single instance of racial violence in the Reconstruction period in all the United States. Disputes over the 1872 election results had produced dual governments at all levels of politics in Louisiana. Fearful that local Democrats would seize power, former slaves under the com-

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mand of African American Civil War veterans and militia officers took over Colfax, the seat of Grant Parish, Louisiana. On Easter Sunday, April 13, 1873, a series of brutal acts were carried out by the White League in Colfax, resulting in the deaths of more than sixty African Americans. After the African American men had laid down their weapons and surrendered, many were flogged, mutilated, and murdered, and African American women were also raped and murdered. A pile of more than twenty bodies was found half-buried in the woods. Monroe Lewis, an elderly black gentleman, was dragged from his bed, forced to say his prayers, and then shot. After being forced to cook food for a party of more than ninety white men, Charles Green was executed. Petitions to President Ulysses S. Grant requesting that justice be rendered were ignored. Alvin K. Benson See also Charleston race riots; Civil War; Clinton massacre; Lynching; Orangeburg massacre; Reconstruction

Colored Women’s League Identification: Group composed of African American women crusading for better conditions for African Americans Date: Founded in June, 1892 Place: Washington, D.C. This organization joined with another organization to form the National Association of Colored Women to promote self-protection, selfadvancement, and social interaction. The Colored Women’s League (CWL), also known as the National League of Colored Women and the Washington Colored Woman’s League, emerged in Washington, D.C., when black women active in education, benevolent, and literary societies joined together in June, 1892, in an effort to improve conditions for African Americans. Helen A. Cook, wife of John T. Cook, served as president, and the recording secretary was Charlotte Forten Grimké, a teacher from Port Royal, South Carolina. Other founders included

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Coralie Franklin Cook, wife of a Howard University administrator; teachers Anna J. Cooper, Mary Jane Patterson, Mary Church Terrell, and Anna E. Murray from M Street School; and Josephine B. Bruce, the first black teacher in the Cleveland schools, who later married Senator Blanche K. Bruce. As Chicago prepared to host the World Columbian Exposition of 1893, the Board of Lady Managers rejected the petitions of these Washington women to participate in the planning process because they did not represent a national organization. In response, the Washington Colored Woman’s League issued an invitation to black women throughout the country to affiliate as a national league. Women’s clubs responded from the state of South Carolina and from the cities of Philadelphia, Kansas City, Denver, and Norfolk, Virginia. In January, 1894, the organization incorporated, becoming the Colored Women’s League. In October, the CWL received an invitation for membership in the National Council of Women (NCW). Its members accepted and sought to expand representation for the NCW convention in the spring of 1895. Instead, the competition between women’s clubs in New York and in Boston resulted in the creation of a second national organization, the National Federation of Afro-American Women. The two national organizations merged in July, 1896, to form the National Association of Colored Women (NACW) to further self-protection, selfadvancement, and social interaction. In 1896, Terrell became the first president of the NACW. Dorothy C. Salem See also Combahee River Collective; Million Woman March; National Association of Colored Women; National Black Women’s Political Leadership Caucus; National Council of Negro Women

Combahee River Collective Identification: Group consisting of black feminists and lesbians Date: Founded in 1974 Place: Boston, Massachusetts

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This group of black feminists challenges multiple sources of oppression, including racial, sexual, heterosexual, and class oppression. The Combahee River Collective, consisting of black feminists and lesbians, was first organized in 1974 and took its name from Harriet Tubman’s 1863 military campaign to free slaves. The members of this Boston-based group are committed to combating multiple systems of oppression and to enacting revolutionary social and political changes. Many black feminists of the twentieth century saw themselves as continuing the “herstory” of African American women, including such early activists as Sojourner Truth, Harriet Tubman, and Mary Church Terrell. They located their contemporary roots in both the black liberation movements (including the Civil Rights and Black Nationalist movements) and the American women’s movement. By necessity, however, they also found themselves challenging the sexism in predominantly male-centered liberation groups, as well as the elitism and racism of white feminism. Thus, beginning in the late 1960’s, black feminists and other feminists of color took part in the second wave of the American women’s movement, in which many women of color challenged the racist and elitist blind spots in the American feminist movement. By 1973, some New York-based black feminists felt the need to form an independent coalition that came to be known as the National Black Feminist Organization (NBFO). Some members of the NBFO, unhappy with what they perceived to be the organization’s “bourgeois-feminist stance” and “lack of a clear political focus,” left to form the Combahee River Collective. Although they suffered from internal disagreements influenced by differences related to class, politics, and sexuality, by 1976 the remaining group had decided to function as a study group, committed to publishing black feminist writings and working on specific social and political projects. While editing Capitalist Patriarchy and the Case for Socialist Feminism (1978), Zillah Eisenstein asked the Combahee River Collective to contribute to her anthology. In response, three members of the group—Demita Frazier, Beverly Smith, and Barbara Smith—drafted the Combahee River Collective Statement in April, 1977.

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Subsequently, the statement was published in several other anthologies, and in 1986, it was finally published as a pamphlet by Kitchen Table: Women of Color Press. The statement focuses on four major areas: the general development of black feminism; the collective’s statement of beliefs; a history of the Combahee River Collective, highlighting the problems of organizing black feminists; and a brief outline of the issues and projects of black feminism. In the Combahee River Collective Statement, the members of the collective noted that although they are dedicated to advancing the struggle of black women, they do not support a philosophy of feminist/lesbian separatism, and they believe in forming coalitions with other progressive liberation groups. As politically committed socialists, they believe in the liberation of all oppressed people and believe that racial, sexual, heterosexual, and class oppression are often enacted simultaneously. Thus, in their brief pamphlet, the Combahee River Collective articulated an important concept concerning black feminist history, theory, and practice. See also Colored Women’s League; Million Woman March; National Association of Colored Women; National Black Women’s Political Leadership Caucus; National Council of Negro Women

Compromise of 1850 The Laws: Agreement among sectional factions, worked out in five separate congressional bills, that permitted California to join the Union as a free state Date: September 20, 1850 The Compromise of 1850 may be seen as a last national attempt to resolve the question of slavery in the territories, as the United States moved closer to civil war. The U.S. Constitution, while creating a mechanism for the addition of states and acknowledging the right of each state to permit and even encourage slavery within its boundaries, made no men-

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tion of slavery’s status in future states. Congress, when it admitted a state, could impose any condition it wished. The national government had first addressed the issue of slavery in territories and new states when the Confederation Congress passed the Northwest Ordinance of 1787. This ordinance excluded slavery from the unsettled area north of the Ohio River to the Mississippi River’s eastern bank, the edge of U.S. holdings. The Missouri Question The issue reemerged in 1817, when Missouri, where between two thousand and three thousand slaves lived, applied to join the United States as a slave state. The question came before the Congress in 1819, and sectional tensions erupted. The U.S. Senate had eleven states each from the free North and the slave-owning South, but the North’s growing population gave it a decisive advantage in the House of Representatives, so proslave forces committed themselves, at the minimum, to maintaining a balance between the regions in the Senate. A temporary solution emerged in 1820, when Senator Henry Clay of Kentucky brokered a solution to the crisis. The Missouri Compromise stipulated that Missouri would be admitted to the Union as a slave state, while Maine, which had petitioned for statehood in late 1819, was admitted as a free state. The compromise also prohibited slavery from the remainder of the Louisiana Purchase in the area north of 36 north latitude, while permitting it south of that line. Between 1820 and 1848, this solution maintained national peace, and the Senate remained balanced. The Southwest and California The Mexican War disrupted the relative peace. The United States received millions of acres of land spanning the area from the Continental Divide west to the Pacific Ocean and south from the forty-ninth parallel to Mexico. Before the war ended, David Wilmot, a member of the House of Representatives from Pennsylvania, attached an amendment to an appropriations bill stipulating that any territory acquired from Mexico must exclude slavery in perpetuity. Although the bill failed to win passage, the Wilmot Proviso fueled the smoldering fires of sectionalism, as many as-

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sumed that any additional western lands would be governed by the Missouri Compromise. In 1849, just a year after the discovery of gold in California, the young California Republic petitioned the Senate for admission to the Union. Besides disrupting the balance between slave and free states, California straddled the 1820 compromise’s line and threw the prior agreements into chaos. In both houses of Congress, the question of slavery became paramount: southerners rejected any attempt to exclude the practice from the West by nearly unanimous margins, while Free-Soilers from the North rejected the possibility of losing equal economic competition by similar percentages. Left in the middle were some elements of the national Whig Party, which struggled to preserve the Union while remaining a

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After the Mexican War, the United States acquired vast western tracts. The new land and the California gold rush prompted western migration, raising the issue of slavery in the territories once again, thirty years after the Missouri Compromise. The Compromise of 1850 admitted California as a free state; created the territories of Utah and New Mexico with no restrictions on slavery; fixed the modern Texas boundary; paid Texas for ceding lands for the New Mexico territory; prohibited slave trading in Washington, D.C.; and enacted the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850.

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national party. The idea of disunion grew. Senator John C. Calhoun of South Carolina, long a firebrand for states’ rights, proposed the formation of a sectional party to guarantee the practice of slavery. William Seward, an abolitionist representative from New York, also rejected the possibility of a compromise, citing the immorality of slavery. President Zachary Taylor, a hero of the Mexican War and a southerner, supported California’s admission as a free state while rejecting the extreme position of persons such as Calhoun. Five Resolutions The first concrete proposal for compromise came from Senator Clay on January 29, 1850. Clay proposed a series of five resolutions: that the California Republic join the United States as a free state; that the rest of the territory acquired in the Mexican Cession be organized without any decision on slavery; that Texas receive monetary compensation in exchange for giving up its claims to parts of contemporary New Mexico; that the slave trade within the District of Columbia be abolished (although the actual practice of slavery would not be affected); and that a more rigorous fugitive slave law be enacted. On February 5 and 6, Clay presented his resolutions and spoke for the Union’s preservation. One week later, Mississippi senator Jefferson Davis rejected Clay’s proposals, using bitter language that also attacked northern intentions. On March 4, the ailing Calhoun, in a speech delivered by Virginia’s James Mason, rejected compromise on the principle of slavery in the territories. On March 7, Daniel Webster acknowledged that both sides had just grievances and urged support for Clay’s whole plan, calming some tensions with his eloquent plea that the Union be preserved. On March 11, Seward stated the abolitionist’s opposition to the compromise because of the immorality of slavery. In April, the Senate referred Clay’s resolutions to a select committee. The committee reported back to the full Senate an omnibus bill that contained the substance of the five original resolutions and sparked another four months of debate. Two major stumbling blocks to the compromise disappeared in July, when President Taylor and Calhoun both died. Millard Fillmore, who supported the compromise’s ideas, replaced Taylor, who had bit-

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terly opposed the omnibus bill. While Clay was vacationing, Stephen A. Douglas broke the omnibus bill into five parts and steered them through the Senate, and the House of Representatives followed suit. By September 20, Congress had adopted the five bills that made up the Compromise of 1850. In 1854, the attempts at balancing the competing interests of the Free-Soil North with the proslave South ended when Senator Douglas proposed that the Kansas and Nebraska areas be organized using the concept of popular sovereignty. Congress adopted the Kansas-Nebraska Act that year, triggering the formation of a national political party dedicated to the idea of an exclusively free-soil policy in the West. The new Republican Party immediately became a force on the national political landscape, and its candidate, John C. Frémont, came within four states of being elected president in 1856. Ultimately, the election of Abraham Lincoln in 1860, a man committed to both the preservation of the Union and the free-soil doctrine, drove the South to secession. John G. Clark Updated by E. A. Reed Further Reading Works that examine the forces and events preceding the Civil War include John C. Waugh’s On the Brink of Civil War: The Compromise of 1850 and How It Changed the Course of American History (Wilmington, Del.: Scholarly Resources, 2003), Bruce Collins’s The Origins of America’s Civil War (New York: Holmes & Meier, 1981), editor Eric Foner’s Politics and Ideology in the Age of the Civil War (New York: Oxford University Press, 1980), Hamilton Holman’s Prologue to Conflict: The Crisis and Compromise of 1850 (New York: W. W. Norton, 1966), David Potter’s The Impending Crisis, 1848-1861 (New York: Harper & Row, 1976), and editor Kenneth Stampp’s The Causes of the Civil War (rev. ed., Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1974). See also Bleeding Kansas; Civil War; Fugitive Slave Law of 1793; Fugitive Slave Law of 1850; Harpers Ferry raid; Kansas-Nebraska Act; Missouri Compromise; Northwest Ordinance; Proslavery argument; Thirteenth Amendment

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Compromise of 1877 The Event: Political resolution of the disputed presidential election of 1876 that put Republican Rutherford B. Hayes in office Date: January, 1877 To get its candidate into the presidency, the price that the Republic Party paid in the Compromise of 1877 was ending Reconstruction in the South. The Compromise of 1877 represents the attempt toward equality that failed during Reconstruction when newly elected President Rutherford B. Hayes ended efforts to establish a biracial democracy in the South. During his presidential campaign, Hayes favored “home rule” for the South as he campaigned against New York governor Samuel J. Tilden, a Democratic reformer. Although Tilden won the popular vote, Hayes claimed victory in South Carolina, Florida, and Louisiana. Republican Reconstruction governments still controlled these states, and it was doubtful that a former Union general could carry them by any other means than fraud.

After ending Reconstruction in the southern states, newly elected president Rutherford B. Hayes forgot his pledge to protect the rights of African Americans in the South. (Library of Congress)

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Many southern Democrats, particularly scalawags, accepted Hayes’s election, particularly if he would leave the South alone after taking office. Ohio Republicans and southern Democrats met in a Washington, D.C., hotel and reached an agreement that if Hayes could assume the presidency, he would remove federal troops from South Carolina and Louisiana so that Democrats could regain control. Hayes consented after being sworn in. Race relations worsened because the Democrats ignored their promises to treat black southerners fairly and Hayes forgot his pledge to ensure the rights of freedmen. Reconstruction had allowed African Americans to reconstitute their families, participate in government, and enjoy equality in dealing with whites, but the 1877 Compromise engendered a hatred of reform throughout the South for nearly one hundred years. African Americans would suffer social restrictions until the 1960’s. Douglas W. Richmond See also Black codes; Disfranchisement laws in Mississippi; Gerrymandering; Politics and government; Reconstruction; Slaughterhouse Cases

Confiscation Acts of 1861 and 1862 The Laws: The first act confiscated all property, including slaves used in the Confederate war effort, but did not clearly free the slaves. The second act stated that slaves would not be returned and would be set free after a certain period of time Dates: August, 1861, and July, 1862 The difference between the first and second acts showed the growing resolve in the Union to end slavery and set the stage for the Emancipation Proclamation. In August, 1861, the U.S. Congress passed a law confiscating all property, including slaves, used in the Confederate war effort. The law required judicial proceedings before any property could be appropriated, and it left unclear whether any confiscated slaves would be freed. The following July, Congress passed the

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Second Confiscation Act. The 1862 law, which also required a judicial hearing, declared that rebels were traitors whose property could be seized for the lifetime of the owner. The only property that would not be returned to the rebels’ heirs was slaves, who were regarded as captives of war and set free after a period of sixty days. President Abraham Lincoln doubted that Congress possessed the constitutional authority to free slaves in the states. When he signed the bill into law, he included a statement of objections to its provisions. Although the power to confiscate rebel property was rarely used during or after the war, the difference between the first and second acts revealed the growing determination in the Union to end slavery and set the stage for the Emancipation Proclamation, which Lincoln issued in January, 1863. Thomas Clarkin See also Civil War; Emancipation Proclamation; Slavery

Congress of Racial Equality Identification: African American civil rights organization Date: Founded in June, 1942 Place: Chicago, Illinois Better known as “CORE,” the Congress of Racial Equality helped to eradicate discrimination in interstate travel on buses and trains and to end discrimination in both the public and private sectors of society, especially in housing and employment. The “Big Five” civil rights organizations in America—the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), the Urban League, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), and the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE)— utilized different approaches in their quest for racial equality. The NAACP excelled in both litigation and lobbying, while the Urban League focused on economic development. SNCC, SCLC, and CORE all utilized techniques of nonviolent direct action. Although the SCLC was the best known of these groups due to the

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Elected national director of CORE in 1968, Roy Innis continued in that office into the twenty-first century, overseeing many shifts in the organization’s philosophy. (Library of Congress)

media savvy of its leader, the Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr., CORE pioneered the technique and was using it for two decades before the SCLC and SNCC were created. Founded in Chicago in 1942, CORE attempted to apply the nonviolent techniques of Mohandas K. Gandhi to the racial problems in America. Skeptical of the approaches of the NAACP and the Urban League, CORE members believed that discrimination had to be confronted directly, without hatred and violence but also without compromise. All CORE members were required to read Krishnalal Shridharani’s book War Without Violence (1939), which described Gandhi’s philosophy and methods. Growing out of the religious radicalism of the 1930’s, CORE was dominated by Methodist leaders in its early years. Many were socialists, and most were pacifists. Three of the six individuals most responsible for the formation of CORE either spent time in jail or served in Civilian Public Service camps because they were conscientious objectors to military service. CORE leaders were admirers of the industrial unions and copied their “sitdown” strikes. In fact, the first CORE “sit-ins” were actually called sit-downs.

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The belief in nonviolence was for both religious and practical reasons. Since many of the early members were ministers or divinity students, nonviolence was merely an extension of their Christian beliefs blended with the Hindu philosophy of Mohandas Gandhi. Pragmatically, nonviolence was viewed as the only appropriate approach to resolving racial problems. A minority group utilizing violence would likely be assisting in their own demise. CORE leaders expressed concerns about movements of black militancy and retaliation and believed that nonviolent direct action was the most reasonable approach to furthering racial equality. CORE was founded as an interracial organization; four of its founders were white and two were black. James Farmer, a charismatic leader with a divinity degree from Howard University, was CORE’s first national chairman and later served as national director from 1961 to 1966. The first major project that CORE undertook was to help black students obtain housing in neighborhoods surrounding the University of Chicago. White members of CORE secured property with restrictive covenants attached to the property. These covenants prevented African Americans from renting or buying the property. The white CORE members then leased the property to African Americans, and integrated housing was established. Campaign Strategy During its first two decades of operation, CORE concentrated on integration of public accommodations. A 1946 project, the Journey of Reconciliation, captured national attention for CORE. In order to test compliance with a recent Supreme Court decision outlawing segregation in interstate travel, CORE decided to take a two-week interracial trip into the South. Eight black and eight white CORE members rode Trailways and Greyhound buses into Virginia, North Carolina, and Kentucky. CORE challenged the segregated seating on the buses but did not challenge segregation in bus stations, restrooms, or restaurants. Twelve arrests were made. The Journey of Reconciliation served as a forerunner to the better-known Freedom Rides in 1961. During the 1940’s and 1950’s, CORE’s membership was small, mostly non-southern, and usually located in university towns.

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Efforts to establish chapters in the South failed due to fears of economic reprisals or violence. While CORE had twenty chapters in 1950, the number of chapters dropped to a half dozen by the mid1950’s. There were several reasons for CORE’s membership problems. Since most chapters were on college campuses, members would graduate and leave. The McCarthyism of the early 1950’s, which brought any political leftist organization under suspicion, helped to suppress membership. CORE also lacked a strong national organization and a staff to help recruit and retain membership. A final problem, and a common one in most interracial groups, was the complaint that whites dominated the leadership structure. Membership became such a problem for CORE that only seven individuals attended the organization’s 1957 national convention. CORE in the Civil Rights Movement With the advent of the sit-in movement in Greensboro, North Carolina, on February 1, 1960, CORE found an issue to rejuvenate its membership and become a leading force in the Civil Rights movement. With the return of James Farmer as national director of CORE in 1961, CORE decided to take on its most challenging project. Farmer and CORE decided to launch the Freedom Rides of 1961. In 1960, the U.S. Supreme Court, in Boynton v. Virginia, extended the prohibition against segregation in interstate travel to cover terminal accommodations as well as trains and buses. Thirteen CORE members, seven African Americans and six whites, boarded Trailways and Greyhound buses in Washington, D.C., and headed into the Deep South. James Farmer and John Lewis were among the riders. (Lewis would soon become chairman of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee and later serve as a member of Congress from Georgia.) It did not take long for arrests and violence to occur. The first arrest took place in Charlotte, North Carolina, and the first extensive violence occurred in Anniston, Alabama. A white mob with chains, sticks, and rocks broke bus windows and slashed tires. The Greyhound bus was fire-bombed, while the Trailways bus was boarded by a white mob who severely beat the Freedom Riders.

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One CORE member suffered permanent brain damage from his beating. The buses were attacked again in Montgomery, Alabama. Most of the original Freedom Riders were either in jail or in hospitals, so new riders were recruited in Montgomery. Members of CORE, SNCC, and the SCLC continued the ride to Jackson, Mississippi, where 360 were arrested. In September of 1961 the Interstate Commerce Commission issued a rule banning segregated facilities in interstate travel. Although ignored in many parts of the Deep South, CORE had won a major moral victory. The success of the Freedom Rides revitalized the southern Civil Rights movement and elevated CORE to the forefront of civil rights organizations. Farmer was thrust into national prominence, and CORE chapters sprang up all over the nation. CORE members felt vindicated that their philosophy of nonviolent direct action had produced a major victory and mobilized thousands of black and white people to work together in seeking racial justice. Other Direct-Action Campaigns After the Freedom Rides, CORE continued to participate in direct action campaigns throughout the Deep South, but the organization was never able to match the success of the Freedom Rides. As CORE efforts continued to be met with violence, many members began to reexamine the organization’s philosophy. The murders of CORE workers Michael Schwerner, Andrew Goodman, and James Chaney in Mississippi in 1964 caused many members to abandon the group’s nonviolent philosophy. Black members also questioned the value of interracial membership, with many coming to the conclusion that only African Americans should remain members. In 1965, CORE was so fundamentally different from what it had been when it was established that Farmer decided to resign. In 1968, Roy Innis took over as national director. In 1978, Washington journalist Jack Anderson accused Innis of ordering the shooting of a former colleague and the beating of another. Also in 1978, former CORE leader James Farmer unsuc-

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cessfully tried to oust Innis as CORE director. Farmer charged that Innis had fraudulently raised millions of dollars using CORE’s name and that Innis had made himself into a “permanently installed dictator.” Innis attacked Farmer for leaving the organization in a shambles and contended that Innes had raised millions of dollars for inner-city community development projects. Darryl Paulson Further Reading Chong, Dennis. Collective Action and the Civil Rights Movement. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991. A theoretical study of the dynamics of collective action within the Civil Rights movement. Farmer, James. Freedom—When? New York: Random House, 1965. The national director of CORE describes the dilemmas confronting CORE and other civil rights groups. ____________. Lay Bare the Heart: The Autobiography of the Civil Rights Movement. New York: New American Library, 1985. An eyewitness account of the Freedom Rides and other civil rights events. Highlights the strengths and weaknesses of the movement. Meier, August, and Elliott Rudwick. CORE: A Study in the Civil Rights Movement, 1942-1968. New York: Oxford University Press, 1973. The most thorough account of the founding and philosophy of CORE. Morris, Alden. The Origins of the Civil Rights Movement. New York: Free Press, 1984. Describes the interrelationships of leading civil rights groups, both tensions and cooperation. See also Black Power movement; Brown v. Board of Education; Chicago sit-ins; Civil Rights Act of 1960; Civil Rights Act of 1964; Civil Rights movement; Freedom Rides; Freedom Summer; Greensboro sit-ins; National Association for the Advancement of Colored People; Southern Christian Leadership Conference; Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee

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Congressional Black Caucus Identification: Group comprising African American members of Congress formed to advance the concerns of African Americans and other members of minority groups Date: 1970 The caucus also strove to ensure that the government assisted others in need, including children, the elderly, and the physically and mentally ill. The Congressional Black Caucus, a group comprising African American members of the U.S. Congress, was established in 1970 by thirteen members of the House of Representatives who joined together “to promote the public welfare through legislation designed to meet the needs of millions of neglected citizens.” Before that year, the House had never had so many African Americans among its 435 members, yet thirteen was still a small minority. The founders of the Congressional Black Caucus hoped that they could gain more visibility and power working together than they could acting alone. In 1971, the Congressional Black Caucus was granted a meeting with President Richard M. Nixon, during which its members presented a document describing sixty actions the government should take on domestic and international issues. The president promised to promote desegregation by seeing that civil rights laws were more stringently enforced (later, caucus members came to believe that he did not work hard enough to fulfill his promise). Media coverage of the meeting helped the group gain recognition. Over the next quarter-century, members of the caucus built and strengthened ties with other influential members of the black community, including educators, community and religious leaders, and local and state legislators, which enabled the group to influence public policy at all levels of government. Although originally formed to promote the concerns of African Americans and other members of minority groups, the caucus also worked to ensure that the government assisted others in need, including children, the elderly, and the physically and men-

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tally ill. The group asserts that it is possible and desirable to develop a national African American position on matters of federal policy, and it has sought to direct that effort. Since its founding, the group has introduced and supported legislation concerning domestic issues such as employment, welfare and health care reform, education reform, small business development, urban revitalization, and federal disaster relief. In 1981, members of the caucus spoke out against the budget proposed by President Jimmy Carter, believing that it devoted too much funding to the military and too little to social programs. At House Judiciary Committee hearings in 1996, following a rash of firebombings of black churches across the South, the caucus criticized the federal government’s apparent failure to prosecute those guilty of the crimes. Many of the group’s positions have been unpopular, even among some African Americans; in the late 1990’s, for example, the caucus strongly endorsed the work of the controversial leader of the Nation of Islam Louis Farrakhan, who was accused by many of teaching anti-Semitism. As the visibility and influence of the caucus increased, the group called for action on international issues of special concern to African Americans, including human rights. It was one

Members of the Congressional Black Caucus seen during a meeting with President Richard M. Nixon in 1971. (Library of Congress)

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of the earliest and strongest voices urging that the United States use pressure against apartheid in South Africa and to call for increased attention and aid to other African nations. Cynthia A. Bily See also Black nationalism; Chisholm’s election to Congress; Church burnings; Politics and government; Summit Meeting of National Negro Leaders

Cooper v. Aaron The Case: U.S. Supreme Court ruling on school desegregation Date: September 12, 1958 The Supreme Court held that fear of violence did not provide justification for postponing school desegregation, and it also affirmed that its constitutional interpretations were legally binding on governors and state legislators. In Brown v. Board of Education (1954) the Supreme Court ordered an end to segregated schools and overturned the “separate but equal” doctrine established in Plessy v. Ferguson (1896). The ambiguity about how to implement school desegregation, however, created the opportunity for school boards to delay and defy the Court’s order. After the Brown decision, the Little Rock, Arkansas, school board approved a plan calling for the desegregation of grades ten through twelve in 1957, to be followed by the desegregation of junior high schools and, finally, the elementary schools. The plan was to be completed by the 1963 school year. Nine black students, carefully selected by the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), were to begin integration of Central High School on September 3, 1957. The day before desegregation was to begin, Governor Orval Faubus ordered the Arkansas National Guard to prevent the black students from enrolling. Governor Faubus claimed that he acted to prevent violence from occurring. After three weeks, a federal court injunction forced the National Guard to withdraw.

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On September 23, the nine black students entered Central High School and were met by an unruly mob. President Dwight D. Eisenhower was forced to dispatch federal troops to Little Rock to enforce the Court’s desegregation order. In the face of the civil unrest, the school board asked for and received a two-and-a-halfyear delay in their desegregation plan. The NAACP appealed the delay in Cooper v. Aaron. Basic Issues Two primary issues confronted the U.S. Supreme Court. First, could the desegregation plan be postponed because of the fear of civil unrest? On September 12, 1958, a unanimous Supreme Court emphatically said no: “The law and order are not here to be preserved by depriving the Negro children of their constitutional rights.” Second, were the governor and legislature bound by decisions of the federal Court? Invoking the supremacy clause of the Constitution, the Court said: “No state legislative, executive or judicial officer can War against the Constitution without violating his undertaking to support it.” Although Governor Faubus lost the legal battle, he became a political folk hero in Arkansas and was elected to six consecutive terms (1955-1967). President Eisenhower was both praised and condemned for his actions. He was praised for sending in federal troops to enforce the Court’s decision and condemned for failing to endorse personally the Brown decision and lend the weight and prestige of the White House to the Court’s ruling. The Cooper case was the first legal confrontation over the enforcement of Brown v. Board of Education. The courts stood alone in this enforcement effort until Congress passed the 1964 Civil Rights Act. The Civil Rights Act endorsed the Brown decision and cut off federal funds to school districts refusing to comply with the Court’s desegregation decision. Darryl Paulson See also Brown v. Board of Education; Civil Rights Act of 1964; Little Rock school desegregation crisis; Plessy v. Ferguson; Segregation

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Council of Federated Organizations Identification: Unique coalition of the major civil rights groups operating in Mississippi Date: 1962-1965 Place: Mississippi Through its massive Mississippi voter-registration project, the Council of Federated Organizations (COFO) played an important role in the struggle of Mississippi’s African American population to achieve voting rights. During the 1960’s Civil Rights movement, Mississippi was perhaps the most difficult and dangerous arena in which activists worked. Essentially a closed society on racial issues, white Mississippi fought tenaciously, often violently, to maintain a way of life based on white supremacy. While some civil rights groups sought to eliminate the state’s dual society by pushing to desegregate schools and public accommodations, others worked to open up Mississippi through black political enfranchisement. One organization that played an important role in this effort was the Council of Federated Organizations (COFO). Makeup of COFO COFO was a unique coalition of the major civil rights groups operating in Mississippi. The council included the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC). Initially formed in 1961 to assist jailed freedom riders in Jackson, COFO was revitalized in 1962 to increase the number of black registered voters. An additional purpose was to eliminate interorganizational competition over the distribution of foundation funds administered through the Voter Education Project (VEP). Neither the NAACP nor the SCLC played significant roles in COFO, although Mississippi NAACP head Aaron Henry served as its president. SNCC, which supplied COFO with most of its staff and much of its operating funds, dominated the coalition.

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Robert Moses, a soft-spoken Harvard graduate student and able veteran SNCC community organizer, served as voter project director; he was assisted by CORE’s David Dennis, another activist skilled in grassroots voter-registration projects. Few informed COFO staffers were unaware of Mississippi’s history on black voting issues. This history had clearly indicated little white support for black political involvement. The first southern state to disfranchise its black electorate constitutionally, Mississippi had bolstered its legal impediments with extralegal efforts whenever it felt the status quo sufficiently threatened. Years of disfranchisement had combined with economic dependence, grinding poverty, rigid segregation, and educational deprivation to trap black Mississippians in an oppressive condition that often worked against direct challenges to white domination. Significant challenges occurred. Influenced by the landmark Brown v. Board of Education Supreme Court decision (1954), in 1955 black Mississippians launched a major voter-registration drive. It ended in failure. Economic reprisals took their toll on many applicants, but the physical violence targeted against the leadership proved more effective. The year 1955 was especially bloody. Black Mississippi was convulsed by the murder of the city of Belzoni’s NAACP president and voting-rights champion, George Lee, the near-assassination of his activist friend Gus Court, and the daylight murder of Brookhaven farmer and civil rights supporter Lamar Smith. Operating in such a repressive atmosphere, COFO’s task would be difficult at best. Voter Registration In 1960, African Americans constituted 42 percent of Mississippi’s population; when COFO began its registration campaign, however, only 5.3 percent of the eligible black population had surmounted the discriminatory laws to qualify as voters. Primarily involved in registering rural African Americans, particularly in the share-cropping delta counties, the organization encountered stiff white resistance and considerable black apprehension. Election officials devised ingenious harassment and delaying tactics against applicants. When such maneuvers or economic intimidation failed to dissuade black interest, violence again came into

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play. It raged in 1963 in key locations in the delta registration drive. Moses himself barely escaped being assassinated in Greenwood; however, he remained undaunted in his efforts. Coalition leaders believed that only with federal intervention could any reasonable amount of success be expected, but little help or encouragement came from Washington. COFO did achieve greater success in disproving white myths about black voting indifference. The highlight of the organization’s 1963 activities was its registration of black voters for its so-called Freedom Election. Eighty mostly white college students from Yale and Stanford Universities were recruited by veteran activist Allard Lowenstein to assist COFO staffers in the campaign. They helped to register eighty-two thousand persons for a mock election that coincided with the regularly scheduled gubernatorial election. Voters could cast ballots for the official candidates or the representatives of a “freedom slate,” consisting of gubernatorial candidate Aaron Henry and his running mate, the Reverend Edwin King, a white Tougaloo College clergyman. Mississippi officials took little interest in the symbolic Henry/King victory, but the election demonstrated that black Mississippians were clearly interested in acquiring equal political rights and representation. Freedom Summer Moses and COFO organizers were encouraged by the Freedom Election. Its outcome added importance to a campaign announced by Dennis for a massive 1964 voter-organizing project dubbed “Freedom Summer.” The project called for a large influx of mostly white college students to assist COFO staffers in registering black voters, establishing community centers, and organizing freedom schools to teach educationally deprived youths basic subjects and to teach adults voting techniques. Project plans also included the establishment of a new political organization, the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party (MFDP). The party was to serve as an effective alternative to the all-white state Democratic Party and to challenge its delegation in the 1964 national convention. Freedom Summer clearly bore the influence of Moses, who insisted that whites not be excluded from participating. Dennis agreed. The two leaders reasoned that exposing the children of

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prominent and affluent whites to the daily terror experienced by African Americans would dramatize effectively the need for federal protection and intervention in the Mississippi movement. It was a calculated motive upon which many SNCC staffers frowned, but one which later circumstances partially justified. After a week of orientation and training in an Oxford, Ohio, women’s college, hundreds of idealistic youth came to Mississippi to work in the summer project. Mississippi hastily mobilized to combat this “invasion,” increasing the size of the highway patrol and enacting legislation designed to curb the project. Jackson’s enlarged police force heavily armed itself and even purchased an armored tank. The Ku Klux Klan and similar extremist groups grew in numbers and influence. The reality of conducting civil rights activity in the South’s most racially oppressive state quickly confronted the volunteers. Numerous workers were falsely arrested, assaulted, or shot at; the homes and churches of many COFO partisans were bombed and burned; and election officials redoubled their efforts not to make concessions in administering Mississippi’s discriminatory registration laws. The reign of terror struck fear in the hearts of workers and prospective black registrants. Clearly, the greatest disruptive event of the summer project was the tragic disappearance of COFO workers James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Michael Schwerner. An intensive manhunt uncovered their bodies in Neshoba County on August 5, six weeks after the search began, in an earthen dam on a remote farm. Their kidnapping and assassination by Klansmen shocked the nation, partially bringing to reality COFO leaders’ cynical prediction of government intervention if white youths became murder victims. That intervention did not occur to the extent desired or expected by COFO workers. Still generally unprotected, the volunteers persisted in their activities, although their registration efforts remained largely ineffective. Throughout the rest of 1964, COFO’s energies centered primarily on MFDP affairs, particularly on seeking the party’s recognition as a vital political force. By the beginning of 1965, the coalition and the registration drive had essentially ended; COFO officially disbanded in 1966.

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Confronting Violence Nothing affected COFO’s registration activities as much as the increased violence they provoked. The repercussions were widespread, affecting staff members and registrants, Mississippians and non-Mississippians alike. Violence had always been used by racial extremists against those who sought to undermine Mississippi’s white supremacy, but at the height of the registration campaign its usage became more tenacious and its results more deadly. During Freedom Summer alone, in addition to the wellpublicized Neshoba County lynchings, at least four other deaths occurred that were related to the state’s accelerated civil rights activities. Slightly less grave were the more than one thousand arrests, thirty-five shootings, and eighty beatings, and the bombing or burning of sixty-five homes, churches, and other buildings. The ever-present terror and the reluctance of the federal government to protect project workers and black registrants influenced the effectiveness of COFO in achieving its objectives. For working-class African Americans, the fear of physical reprisal often interacted with the reality of economic reprisal, creating a high price to pay for registering to vote. When added to the force of the state’s discriminatory registration procedures, the results were discouraging. In the two years from 1962 to 1964, when COFO was functioning at its highest level, black voter registration increased by only 1.4 percent. Mississippi’s 1964 registration rate of 6.7 percent for African Americans was the lowest in the nation. This lack of significant progress in Mississippi caused the Voter Education Project in late 1963 to divert its financial contributions from COFO to more promising voter projects. Still, COFO persisted. The various campaign obstacles had a sobering effect on all involved, but the project also produced positive signs. The 1963 Freedom Election was convincing evidence of black voting aspirations, and it helped to stimulate interest across the state. This expanded interest continued into the summer project. Despite the summer’s terrorism, some seventeen thousand African Americans were convinced to seek registration in their county courthouses, although only sixteen hundred actually succeeded. Additionally, the motivation translated into real grassroots political action in the form of the MFDP. The party did

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not gain recognition as the legitimate representative of Mississippi Democrats. Through the efforts of such personable and magnetic individuals as Fannie Lou Hamer, however, black Mississippians’ political plight received further national exposure. Legacy Perhaps COFO’s greatest contribution in the voting-rights struggle was its role in dramatizing the inhumanity of Mississippi’s resistance to black political involvement. In so doing, it aided immeasurably the national call for a greater federal role in southern voting practices. COFO’s project eventually thus achieved one of its deeper aims. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s Selma voting-rights campaign clearly influenced congressional passage of the 1965 Voting Rights Act, but COFO’s Mississippi project was also significant. Ultimately, COFO aided in opening Mississippi society and shaping its participatory political culture. In 1991, Mississippi had more black elected officials than any other state in the nation. With the country’s largest percentage of African Americans in its population, Mississippi had achieved the meaningful political empowerment that many COFO idealists envisioned. Robert L. Jenkins Further Reading Belfrage, Sally. Freedom Summer. New York: Viking Press, 1965. One of the best personal accounts to come out of the 1964 Freedom Summer project. Belfrage’s book covers her training and orientation in Ohio and the ordeal of the white resistance in Mississippi. Branch, Taylor. Pillar of Fire: America in the King Years, 1963-65. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1998. Cagin, Seth, and Philip Dray. We Are Not Afraid: The Story of Goodman, Schwerner, and Chaney and the Civil Rights Campaign in Mississippi. New York: Macmillan, 1988. A detailed account of the murders of the three civil rights workers and the COFO Freedom Summer project. The authors do much to correct the often-repeated suggestion that the Federal Bureau of Investigation played a significant role in protecting the volunteers.

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Carson, Clayborne. In Struggle: SNCC and the Black Awakening of the 1960’s. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1981. One of the best civil rights organizational histories available. Comprehensively treats the student group, its difficulties and successes, and its evolution from nonviolence to militancy in the mid-1960’s. The coverage of Mississippi voting rights and COFO matters is especially good. Notes and index. Dittmer, John. “The Politics of the Mississippi Movement, 19541964.” In The Civil Rights Movement in America, edited by Charles W. Eagles. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1986. A good analysis of the black Mississippi struggle. Dittmer understandably focuses much attention on the COFO project. Notes. Holt, Len. The Summer That Didn’t End. New York: William Morrow, 1965. The personal account of a black Washington, D.C., lawyer who came to Mississippi to work in the 1964 Freedom Summer project. Holt focuses on the civil rights worker murders and the individual COFO projects. Appendix and index. Lawson, Steven F. Black Ballots: Voting Rights in the South, 19441969. New York: Columbia University Press, 1976. A comprehensive study of the black voting-rights struggle. McAdam, Doug. Freedom Summer. New York: Oxford University Press, 1988. A sociohistorical study of the COFO volunteers and what influenced them. McAdam claims that the project forever changed these liberal whites, radicalizing them in ways that appeared in their post-1964 summer reform efforts. Appendix, notes, bibliography, and index. McClymer, John F., ed. Mississippi Freedom Summer. Belmont, Calif.: Thomson/Wadsworth, 2004. Meier, August, and Elliot Rudwick. CORE: A Study in the Civil Rights Movement, 1942-1968. New York: Oxford University Press, 1973. The most comprehensive and scholarly treatment of the Congress of Racial Equality. Includes much discussion of CORE’s involvement in the Mississippi voting-rights struggle. References, notes, and index. Silver, James W. Mississippi: The Closed Society. New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1964. The classic indictment of Missis-

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sippi and its reluctance to address change in its racial order. The book’s genesis was primarily the violent white reaction to the integration of the University of Mississippi. Zinn, Howard. SNCC: The New Abolitionists. Cambridge, Mass.: South End Press, 2002. Although not a formal history, this book is a penetrating analysis of SNCC by one of its first historians, who was also its adviser. Although dated, it remains essential reading for understanding this organization, which formed the largest part of the COFO coalition. See also Disfranchisement laws in Mississippi; Gerrymandering; Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party; University of Mississippi desegregation; Williams v. Mississippi

Cowboys Definition: African Americans who worked as ranch hands on the Western frontier The contribution of the African American cowboy to the westward movement and the settlement of the western United States is undeniable. Despite the predominantly white images in television and film Westerns, many cowboys were African American. Attracted by the high wages and the pull of the open range, the cowboys were a diverse lot that included former Civil War soldiers, former African American slaves, Mexicans, and American Indians. Evidence suggests that perhaps as many as 25 percent of cowboys were African American. Most of these African Americans were unable to read or write, so few records of their daily life exist, but like their peers, they spent as many as four straight months in the saddle, working the long drives. The cowboy’s job was dangerous, hard, and lonely. Because cowboys had to work together to herd cattle on trails, segregation was impractical, but African American cowboys were constantly reminded of the inequalities of the time. Pay for African American cowboys was frequently less than for their

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Although black contributions to opening the West were ignored by the whitedominated Hollywood film industry, a parallel black film industry celebrated its own Western heroes. A real cowboy of African and Native American descent, Bill Pickett (1870-1932) competed successfully in rodeos until banned because of his African heritage and had a twenty-six-year career in Wild West shows and films. He died from a kick in the head by a horse while working on a ranch. (Library of Congress)

white counterparts, and segregation was common in cattle towns along the trail. Despite the discrimination they faced, however, the contribution of the African American cowboy to the westward movement and the settlement of the western United States is indisputable. Donald C. Simmons, Jr. See also Film history; Segregation on the frontier; Stereotypes

Crown Heights conflicts The Event: Racial unrest between Hasidic Jews and their immigrant neighbors Date: August, 1991 Place: Brooklyn, New York

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The disturbances led to investigations at both the state and national levels. The Justice Department also conducted investigations of possible civil rights violations. Crown Heights, a racially mixed section of Brooklyn, New York, began to experience civil unrest in the late 1980’s. Many of the residents are poor black immigrants from Caribbean countries and Lubavitchers. The latter are Orthodox (Hasidic) Jews who maintain a strong religious identity that is reflected in their dress and their insularity. These groups had been subjected to stereotyping and victimized by discrimination, from both within and without the Crown Heights community. African American leaders charged that the Lubavitchers received better treatment from local authorities than that accorded black residents, and Hasidic leaders countered that black anti-Semitism made Lubavitchers victims of street crimes and subject to continual harassment. Triggering the Violence The racial unrest erupted into full-scale rioting in the summer of 1991, on the heels of the accidental killing of a seven-year-old Guyanese American youth named Gavin Cato. On the evening of August 19, a car carrying the Lubavitcher Grand Rebbe and Menachem Schneerson, a Hasidic spiritual leader, ran a red light at the intersection of President Street and Utica Avenue, striking and killing Cato and injuring his cousin, Angela. As a crowd gathered at the scene, a private Jewish ambulance whisked away the Hasidic driver, Yosef Lifsh, and his two passengers. Their departure spurred an angry reaction, leading, three hours later, to the fatal stabbing of Yankel Rosenbaum, a visiting Hasidic professor from Australia, and the arrest of his alleged attacker, a sixteen-year-old Trinidadian American and Brooklyn resident, Lemrick Nelson, Jr. In the predawn hours of August 20, after Rosenbaum’s death at Kings County Hospital, protests escalated into mob violence, with African Americans and Hasidic Jews fighting with words, stones, and bottles, ignoring police efforts to stop the rioting. The violence continued through the next two days, fed by the rumor (later shown to be true) that the Hasidic driver, Lifsh, had left on a

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plane bound for Israel. Black leaders, including the Reverend Al Sharpton and Alton Maddox, demanded the arrest and return of Lifsh, and their followers rebuffed the efforts of New York mayor David Dinkins and police commissioner Lee Brown to restore peace, especially after learning that Nelson had been charged with second-degree murder in Rosenbaum’s death. By August 24, rioting finally gave way to protest marches and an uneasy peace maintained by auxiliary police units that had been sent into Crown Heights to restore order. In the months following the demonstrations, both groups complained that the police and city officials did little to solve the community’s problems. In September, the Brooklyn grand jury refused to indict Lifsh in the death of Cato, angering the black citizens and their leaders. More unrest followed in October, 1992, when Nelson was acquitted of all charges in Rosenbaum’s death. The Hasidic Jews protested and within a month filed a classaction suit against the city government on the grounds of unfair treatment in the 1991 riots. The disturbances led to investigations at both the state and national levels. One major New York report issued in July, 1993, by Richard Girgenti, state director of criminal justice, was highly critical of both Mayor Dinkins and Commissioner Brown. The report, forwarded to the U.S. Attorney General, also led to ongoing Justice Department investigations of possible civil rights violations. John W. Fiero See also Black Jews; “Black Manifesto”; Hawkins murder; Jews and African Americans

Cubans and African Americans The tension that arose between African Americans and post-1959 Cuban refugees in the Miami area of Florida (Dade County) represents an illuminating case study of the effects of immigration on urban racial and ethnic relations in the late twentieth century.

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In the late twentieth century, the attitude of African Americans and their organizations to immigration was one of ambivalence. As a minority group, African Americans could not consistently oppose immigration as a threat to some imagined American cultural or ethnic purity. Yet many African Americans, struggling against discrimination and disadvantage, feared immigrants as competitors for scarce jobs and public services. In Dade County, Florida, unrestricted immigration from Cuba after Fidel Castro took power in 1959 fed the anxieties of black Miami residents about economic displacement and political disempowerment. The black riots that erupted in Miami in 1980, 1982, and 1989, although ostensibly sparked by police brutality, were widely ascribed by contemporary commentators to resentment against Cuban refugees. Cuban Refugees Tensions between African Americans and black immigrants from Jamaica and Haiti have been mitigated somewhat by a shared African heritage; with the refugee flow from Cuba, however, this factor did not come into play as much. When Castro took power in Cuba in 1959, people of full or partial African descent constituted nearly 40 percent of the total population of Cuba; yet 90 percent or more of the Cuban refugees of the 1960’s and early 1970’s were white. It was not until the Mariel boatlift of May to September, 1980, that the proportion of Afro-Cubans in the refugee flow came to approximate that of the island’s population. By the beginning of 1980, many of the Cuban refugees of the 1960’s and early 1970’s, who had arrived nearly penniless, had grown prosperous. Such success was due to the relatively high proportion of professionals and entrepreneurs among the earliest refugees, the refugees’ hard work, and the generous assistance (about $2.6 billion between 1972 and 1976) that the refugees, as defectors from a communist regime, received from the federal government to help defray the costs of vocational training and retraining, transportation, and resettlement. African Americans complained that the refugees received more assistance than either other immigrants or poor native-born Americans did. The

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Mariel boatlift refugees of May to September, 1980, and refugees who arrived after that year did not, however, receive as much government help as the earlier waves of immigrants. African Americans also complained about the way refugees benefited from federal programs not specifically targeted at refugees. When affirmative action policies were implemented in the late 1960’s to provide set-asides for minority businesses, Hispanics were considered to be a minority and Cubans were Hispanics; hence, refugee-owned businesses were judged to qualify as minority-owned businesses. Local African Americans resented what they saw as poaching by white newcomers on an entitlement originally intended for African Americans. Immigration Status of Cubans as Bone of Contention From 1959 to 1980, hardly any Cuban reaching U.S. shores was deported. The Cuban Adjustment Act of 1966 enabled all Cuban refugees to change their status to that of permanent resident after one year of living in the United States; other immigrants did not enjoy this privilege. After 1972, more and more Haitians, like Cubans, tried to reach the United States. Cubans fleeing by boat were always welcomed. In contrast, Haitians fleeing by boat were unceremoniously sent back to Haiti if intercepted at sea, detained in prison if they reached Florida, and often deported. Although the official justification for the disparity in treatment was ideological (Cuba was communist; Haiti was not), many Miami black activists perceived racism. Many Cuban escapees were white; almost all Haitian escapees were black. In May, 1995, U.S. president Bill Clinton officially ended the privileged status of Cuban refugees. When the first Cuban escapees were sent back to Cuba, on May 10, Miami Cubans staged a four-day action of civil disobedience; Miami’s native-born African Americans stayed away from the protest. Between 1968 and 1989, there were several episodes of rioting by black Miamians, the bloodiest of which took place in 1980. The riots of 1980, 1982, and 1989 were widely attributed by journalists and scholars to the resentment of black Miami residents against Cuban refugees, although this was only one reason. All the riots stemmed from responses to alleged police misuse of

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force. In 1982 and 1989, the officers who used force were Hispanic, and Cubans did tend to rally around Hispanic police officers accused of brutality. Yet conflict between blacks and police officers had existed even before the mass arrival of Cuban refugees. Although one victim of black violence in the 1980 riot was a Cuban refugee, other victims were non-Hispanic whites: The mob was as much antiwhite as anti-Cuban. Nor were native-born African Americans the only ones to complain about police brutality. In 1992, an incident of police violence against a Haitian in a Cuban-owned store aroused protest; and in 1990, Miami’s Puerto Ricans also rioted against an alleged police abuse of force. Job Displacement and Conflict in Local Politics Whether Cuban refugees gained occupationally at the expense of Miami’s African Americans is a controversial issue, although local black leaders lodged complaints about such displacement as early as the early 1960’s. Allegations that Cubans ousted African Americans from service jobs in hotels and restaurants were met by counterallegations that African Americans were themselves leaving such jobs voluntarily and that the percentage of Miami African Americans in white-collar jobs had increased by 1980. By founding many new businesses, Cuban refugees created jobs; many such jobs, however, went to fellow refugees rather than to African Americans. As the Hispanic population grew and trade links with Latin America expanded, native-born African Americans were hurt by the job requirement of fluency in Spanish. Although the Miami area economic pie grew during the 1960’s and 1970’s, the African American slice of that pie, scholars concede, was stagnant; compared with pre-1980 Cuban refugees, they suffered in 1980 from greater poverty and unemployment and had a lower rate of entrepreneurship. From 1960 to 1990, the Hispanic percentage of Dade County’s population (most, but not all of it, Cuban) rose from barely 10 percent to 49 percent; the black percentage of the county’s population never rose above 20 percent. By the late 1970’s, more and more Cuban refugees were becoming naturalized U.S. citizens, gaining both the right to vote and a decisive weight in local poli-

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tics. In 1983, the Puerto Rican-born mayor dismissed the black city manager, replacing him with a Cuban. Cuban American candidates defeated African American candidates for the posts of mayor of Miami in 1985, Dade County Schools superintendent in 1990, Dade County district attorney in 1993, and mayor of Dade County in 1996. The Cuban influx into elective politics prevented a black takeover of city hall (as had taken place in Atlanta, Georgia, and Detroit, Michigan), thereby reducing the chances for black businesspeople to benefit from municipal contracts. Yet African Americans’ powerlessness was relative: They could vote and affect the outcome of elections. The Nelson Mandela Affair and the Miami Boycott In spring of 1990, Mayor Xavier Suar persuaded the Miami city government to withdraw its official welcome to Nelson Mandela, the leader of the black liberation struggle in South Africa, who was then touring the United States. Mandela, in a television interview, had praised Castro. Partly in response to this slap at Mandela, a Miami black civil rights leader, H. T. Smith, called for a nationwide boycott by black organizations of Miamiarea hotels; this boycott was remarkably effective. It was ended in 1993 with an agreement promising greater efforts to employ African Americans in Miami’s hospitality industry. Dade County’s politics were not simply a Cuban-African American struggle. Sometimes African Americans saw non-Hispanic whites as allies against the Cubans: In his losing bid for Congress against a Cuban American in 1989, the non-Hispanic white candidate won most of the black votes. Sometimes African Americans saw both Cubans and non-Hispanic whites as oppressors of African Americans. In a lawsuit that met with success in 1992, African Americans and Cubans cooperated in an effort to make the Dade County Commission more representative of ethnic minorities. African Americans did not always form a united front against the Cubans: In a 1980 referendum ending the provision of Spanishlanguage documents and services by the Dade County government, black voters split, 44 percent for the proposition and 56 percent against. (Bilingualism was restored in 1993.) Haitians and

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native-born African Americans did not agree on all issues; among non-Hispanic whites, white ethnic migrants from the North did not always agree with white Anglo-Saxon Protestants of southern background; and some of Miami’s non-Cuban Hispanics resented Cuban predominance. In other major U.S. cities, Cubans were, if present at all, a smaller part of the larger Hispanic group. Only in Miami did Hispanics build up a powerful political machine; hence, black resentment of Hispanic political power played little role in race relations elsewhere. The police brutality issue also operated differently: in Compton, California, Washington, D.C., and Detroit, Michigan, for example, there were complaints, in the early 1990’s, about alleged brutality by black police officers against Hispanics. Paul D. Mageli Further Reading Ruth Reitan’s The Rise and Decline of an Alliance: Cuba and African American Leaders in the 1960’s (East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 1999) is a valuable contribution to the study of Cuban and African American relations. Between Race and Empire: African-Americans and Cubans Before the Cuban Revolution (Philadelphia, Pa.: Temple University Press, 1998) edited by Lisa Brock and Digna Castañeda Fuertes is an illuminating study of early relations between the two groups. In Imagining Miami (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1997), the best introductory study, Sheila Croucher attacks the notion that either the black or the Cuban community is a monolith. Her analysis of the Mandela affair and the subsequent boycott is especially enlightening. Marvin Dunn’s Black Miami in the Twentieth Century (Tallahassee: University of Florida Press, 1997) is informative on the riots. On the politics of bilingualism, consult Max Castro’s essay in Guillermo J. Grenier and Alexis Stepick’s Miami Now! (Tallahassee: University Press of Florida, 1992). The displacement thesis is presented most clearly in historian Raymond A. Mohl’s “On the Edge: Blacks and Hispanics in Metropolitan Miami Since 1959,” Florida Historical Quarterly (vol. 69, no. 1, July, 1990). For rebuttals of this thesis, consult chapter 3 of Alex Stepick and Alejandro

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Portes’s City on the Edge: The Transformation of Miami (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993) and Alex Stepick and Guillermo Grenier’s “Cubans in Miami,” in In the Barrios: Latinos and the Underclass Debate, edited by Joan Moore and Raquel Pinderhughes (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 1993). City on the Edge is also informative on Miami’s Haitians. See also Haitians; Irish and African Americans; Jamaicans; Miami riots; West Indians

Cumming v. Richmond County Board of Education The Case: U.S. Supreme Court ruling on separate but equal doctrine Date: December 18, 1899 The Supreme Court refused to enforce the equal stipulation in the separate but equal doctrine governing segregated schools that had been established in its landmark 1896 decision. Just three years after announcing the separate but equal doctrine in Plessy v. Ferguson (1896), the Supreme Court unanimously refused to take action in a case in which school facilities for black and white people were definitely unequal. Cumming, which amounted to the Court’s first approval of racially segregated public schools, was never overturned. John Marshall Harlan, who wrote the opinion for the Court, had dissented vigorously in Plessy but was unable to find a clear, unmistakable disregard of equality in Cumming. In 1879 the Augusta, Georgia, school board had established the first African American public high school in the state. The board closed the school in 1897, claiming that the money was needed for black primary school education. Because a Georgia statute explicitly provided for separate but equal facilities, the local judge did not bother to consider the U.S. Constitution in overturning the board’s judgment. Still, the Georgia supreme court,

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without offering any significant reasons, overturned the local judge’s opinion. African Americans argued that under the Fourteenth Amendment’s equal protection clause, they were entitled to a high school if one was provided for white students. However, Harlan asserted that the African American plaintiffs had to prove the board decision was motivated exclusively by hostility toward African Americans, which was impossible to prove. To reach his decision, Harlan ignored several lower court precedents that went in the opposite direction. Richard L. Wilson See also Brown v. Board of Education; Fourteenth Amendment; Plessy v. Ferguson

Defense industry desegregation The Event: President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s issuing of Executive Order 8802, which prohibited discrimination of race or color in the defense industry and armed forces Date: June 25, 1941 The 1941 desegregation of the U.S. defense industry was a major step in the advancement of African American civil rights and black-white relations. Ever since the Revolutionary War, the United States had experienced difficulty in bringing African Americans into its military. Although one of the victims of the Boston massacre, Crispus Attucks, was an African American, and black soldiers were with George Washington when he made his famous 1776 Christmas crossing of the Delaware River to attack the Hessians at Trenton and Princeton, it was not until the Civil War (1861-1865) that African American troops were recruited officially into the United States Army. Even then, however, a rigid policy of segregation was maintained. In the two wars that followed, the SpanishAmerican War (1898) and World War I (1914-1919), both the Army and Navy had black troops, but largely in supporting roles,

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and always as separate, segregated units. In addition, black troop strength was kept deliberately low, partly to avoid offending white soldiers and partly because the military establishment had a low opinion of the abilities of African American troops. Roosevelt’s Role During the 1930’s, however, under the presidency of Franklin D. Roosevelt, these prejudiced traditions began to change. Roosevelt’s New Deal, which had been put into place to fight the ravages of the Great Depression, also addressed a number of social conditions, including civil rights. Although civil rights were never at the forefront of Roosevelt’s agenda, his administration was more committed to them than any previous presidency had been, and his wife, the redoubtable Eleanor Roosevelt, was an especially strong and capable advocate for racial equality and justice. In addition, the shrewdly realistic president, who foresaw the coming struggle with Nazi Germany, realized that the U.S. military needed every capable citizen, of whatever color or background. The policy of “Jim Crowism,” or rigid segregation of black and white people, remained largely in place, however. Correctly estimating the extent and depth of prejudice against African American participation in the military, especially in positions of responsibility, Roosevelt moved cautiously. He had been assistant secretary of the Navy under President Woodrow Wilson during World War I, and he now prodded and encouraged the Navy high command to enlist additional African Americans and to place them in positions of greater responsibility than stewards or mess servers. Gradually and slowly, the Navy responded. A similar broadening took place in the Army in 1935, when the president insisted that African American medical officers and chaplains be called up from the reserves. On October 9, 1940, Roosevelt announced a revised racial policy for the armed forces; its intent was to bring more African Americans into the military and to place them in positions of trust and responsibility. At a glacial but perceptible pace, the United States military was becoming more receptive to African Americans.

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Despite President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s order to desegregate the defense industries, African American women were not permitted to serve in the U.S. Navy’s Women Accepted for Voluntary Emergency Service (WAVES) until 1944. (National Archives)

Slow Progress The progress was not sufficiently rapid for many African Americans, among them A. Philip Randolph, president of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, one of the strongest and most effective African American unions in the country. Randolph, who well understood that black voters had become an essential part of the Democratic Party’s electoral base, calculated that Roosevelt would need to respond to African American demands, especially as the 1940 presidential elections approached. Randolph’s logic and timing were correct. In 1940, Roosevelt ran for an unprecedented third term as president. Randolph, along with former Republican city councilman Grant Reynolds of New York City, began a campaign against the Jim Crow practices still prevalent in the United States military. Randolph and Reynolds also called for greater opportunities for African American workers in the rapidly growing defense industries, which had arisen as the United States rearmed against

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the threat from Nazi Germany and imperialist Japan. As the campaign intensified, Roosevelt faced a difficult situation that threatened his southern, conservative support at the same time that it endangered his urban, liberal allies. When Randolph announced plans for a march on Washington, scheduled for July 1, 1941, Roosevelt knew he must act. His determination was steeled by the resolve of his wife, Eleanor, who had long been a champion of equal rights for African Americans, and whose contacts with the black community were strong and deep. Executive Order 8802 On June 25, 1941, Roosevelt issued Executive Order 8802, which enunciated a broad policy of racial equality in the armed forces and the defense industry. The order was clear and sweeping in its intent: In offering the policy of full participation in the defense program by all persons regardless of color, race, creed, or national origin, and directing certain action in furtherance of said policy . . . all departments of the government, including the Armed Forces, shall lead the way in erasing discrimination over color or race.

President Roosevelt backed up the policy by establishing the Fair Employment Practices Committee, which was charged with monitoring and enforcing compliance among civilian contractors. It is estimated that Roosevelt’s executive order, combined with the work of the commission, helped to bring fifty-three thousand African American civilians into defense industry jobs they otherwise would not have held. The timing of the policy was impeccable. Randolph and the other campaign leaders, satisfied that the Roosevelt administration was sincere in its commitment to civil rights, called off the march on Washington. Political conservatives, who otherwise might have challenged the president’s order, had to admit that it would not be proper to expect African Americans to serve in the military without allowing them to hold responsible positions and achieve corresponding rank. Black voters responded enthusiastically to the Roosevelt reelection campaign, helping him to sweep to victory in the November balloting.

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Inevitably, there were racial tensions and outbreaks of violence, especially in lower- and middle-class northern neighborhoods. In 1943, for example, tension between black and white workers led to open violence at a park on Belle Isle near Detroit; in the end, federal troops had to be called in to restore order, and twenty-five African Americans and nine whites had been killed. Similar, if less bloody, events took place in other cities. Still, the transition to a more equitable situation continued in both civilian and military life. However, the traditional segregation remained. During World War II, black units still were kept separate and apart from white troops, and were generally reserved for support and logistical duties rather than combat. When the difficulties and emergencies of battle required it, African American units were brought into the fighting line; generally, they acquitted themselves well. By the end of the war, African Americans had distinguished themselves as ground soldiers, sailors, and pilots in both combat and noncombat situations. After the surrender of the Axis Powers in 1945, there was a sense of inevitable change ahead for the United States military. The question of whether it would be a peaceful, productive change remained. After World War II Harry S. Truman, who assumed the presidency in 1945 after the death of Franklin D. Roosevelt, was determined to make the change in a proper fashion. He assembled a special Civil Rights Committee which, on October 30, 1947, issued its report, To Secure These Rights. Clearly and unhesitatingly, the report called for the elimination of segregation in the United States military. As the 1948 presidential elections approached, the issue of African Americans in the military affected the political atmosphere. Truman and the national Democratic Party, as heirs of the Roosevelt New Deal, had strong connections with the Civil Rights movement and its leaders; at the same time, much of the traditional Democratic strength was in the South, where civil rights issues were strongly opposed by the entrenched establishment. Southern politicians, such as Strom Thurmond of South Carolina,

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threatened to bolt the party if the Democrats adopted a strong civil rights platform at their convention; however, inspired by the passionate appeal of Mayor Hubert H. Humphrey of Minneapolis, the Democrats did indeed adopt a positive plank on civil rights. The southerners stormed out, nominating Thurmond to run on the “Dixiecrat” ticket, and Truman went on to win a comefrom-behind victory in November. One element of that victory was Truman’s own Executive Order 9981, issued on July 26, 1948, just after the Democratic Party convention. Truman’s order was similar to but stronger than Roosevelt’s: It required equal opportunity in the armed forces of the United States, regardless of race, and called upon the military services to move immediately to implement the directive. The Air Force reacted promptly and soon achieved remarkable integration of black and white troops; the Navy and Marines were more hesitant in their acceptance. In the end, however, all branches of the armed forces responded, making them among the most egalitarian and equitable of U.S. institutions. Michael Witkoski Further Reading Richard Dalifiume’s Desegregation of the U.S. Armed Forces: Fighting on Two Fronts, 1939-1953 (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1969) emphasizes the role of African Americans as soldiers, sailors, and airmen and sheds additional light on Roosevelt’s order and its impact. Bernard C. Nalty’s Strength for the Fight: A History of Black Americans in the Military (New York: Free Press, 1986) provides a comprehensive narrative of the relationship between African Americans and the U.S. armed forces. Richard Stillman’s Integration of the Negro in the U.S. Armed Forces (New York: Frederick A. Praeger, 1968) provides an especially good discussion of the Roosevelt and Truman policies regarding blacks in the military. The U.S. Department of Defense’s Black Americans in Defense of Our Nation (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1991) is a pictorial documentary that covers all branches of the armed forces and includes defense- and military-related occupations as well. C. Vann Woodward’s The Strange Career of Jim Crow (2d rev. ed., New York: Oxford Univer-

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sity Press, 1966) has remained a definitive work on legal and official segregation in American life. See also Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters; Fair Employment Practices Committee; Integration; Military; Military desegregation; President’s Committee on Civil Rights; Race riots of 1943; World War II

Demographic trends Definition: Historical changes in the size, composition, characteristics, and geographical distribution of African Americans During their long history in North America, African Americans have constituted one of the largest population groups in the Western Hemisphere, and their demographic history is a major part of American history. Since the first Africans arrived in North America during the early seventeenth century, the African American population has grown to reach a total of thirty-six million people—a number greater than the populations of about 158 members of the 191 countries in the United Nations in the year 2005. The first African slaves arrived in Virginia in 1619. Through the following years, more people from Africa began appearing throughout the new colonies established by Europeans on the eastern coast of North America. The first slaves came to the Dutch lands in the northeast in 1626. The Dutch colonial city of New Amsterdam, later New York, had 100 African slaves in 1640, nearly one-third of the settlement’s total population. By the time the English conquered the Dutch colony in 1664, an estimated 1,500 people were living in New Amsterdam, 300 of whom were slaves of African origin. The Slave Population With the growth of plantation economies in Virginia and surrounding areas from the late seventeenth century onward, the South became the main destination for people from Africa. During the 1680’s, slave traders transported 2,000 Africans into Vir-

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African American Population Growth, 1790-2000, with Projections Through 2050 Year

Total African Percentage of Americans total population

1790

757,208

19.3

1800

1,002,037

18.9

1810

1,377,808

19.0

1820

1,771,656

18.4

1830

2,328,642

18.1

1840

2,873,648

16.8

1850

3,638,808

15.7

1860

4,441,830

14.1

1870

5,392,172

13.5

1880

6,580,973

13.1

1890

7,488,676

11.9

1900

8,833,994

11.6

1910

9,797,763

10.7

1920

10,463,131

9.9

1930

11,891,843

9.7

1940

12,865,518

9.8

1950

15,042,286

10.0

1960

18,871,831

10.5

1970

22,580,000

11.0

1980

26,945,025

11.7

1990

29,986,060

12.1

2000

35,818,000

12.7

2010

40,454,000

13.1

2020

45,365,000

13.5

2030

50,442,000

13.9

2040

55,876,000

14.3

2050

61,361,000

14.6

Source: U.S. Bureau of the Census, Census of Population and Housing, 2000; U.S. Interim Projections by Age, Race, and Hispanic Origin, 2004.

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ginia, and this number increased to about 4,000 in the following decade. Arrivals from Africa doubled again, to an estimated 8,000 in the first decade of the eighteenth century. In South Carolina and Georgia, the slave trade led to so rapid an increase in the African population in the early eighteenth century, that there were about twice as many people of African descent as whites in this part of the South by the 1720’s, when arrivals from Africa had risen to 2,000 per year. Spanish-held Florida also contained large numbers of free blacks, as well as slaves, at that time, and one-fourth of the 1,500 people in the Florida city of St. Augustine were of African ancestry in 1746. At the mouth of the Mississippi River, African slaves had arrived in Louisiana with French settlers in the early eighteenth century, but their numbers increased slowly until the Spanish took control of Louisiana in 1769. Under the Spanish and then after the return to French possession, Louisiana rapidly developed an economy based on plantation slave labor. Post-Eighteenth Century Trends The numbers of African Americans have increased steadily over the course of American history. At the same time, the total American population has also grown. African Americans made up a much larger percentage of Americans at the beginning of the nation’s history than at any time since. By the time of the first U.S. Census in 1790, the African origin population had grown to a reported 757,208 people—a figure that represented nearly one-fifth of the new nation’s entire population. Before the mid-twentieth century, African Americans were highly concentrated in the South, where they made up an estimated one-third of the population from 1790 until the Civil War (1861-1865). Although the numbers of African Americans grew steadily through the first half of the nineteenth century, the European population—thanks to increased immigration—grew even more rapidly, so that the proportion of African Americans decreased through that period. By 1840, people of African descent made up slightly under 17 percent of the total population. This figure fell to slightly under 16 percent in 1850 and 14 percent in 1860.

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Part of the slower growth of African Americans, compared to Europeans, was due to the fact that the U.S. Constitution had officially ended the importation of slaves from Africa in 1808. Although some slaves continued to be smuggled into the country after that date, the end of the legal shipment of slaves from across the Atlantic did slow down African American population growth. The United States has always had a free black population, but most African Americans were held in slavery until the end of the Civil War. Of the 757,208 people of African ancestry in the country in 1790, less than 8 percent (59,406) were free. In 1850, 434,495 “free colored” people (the term used by the census that year) lived in the United States. This meant that slightly under 89 percent of all African Americans remained slaves in the middle of the nineteenth century. Immediately after the Civil War ended in 1865, the Thirteenth Amendment abolished slavery throughout the United States. Immigration from Europe then increased greatly, with virtually no immigration from Africa. This disparity resulted in a steady decline in the African American proportion of the nation. By 1920, African Americans made up less than one-tenth of all Americans. After World War II ended in 1945, the African American proportion of the national population began to rise once again. By the beginning of the twenty-first century, slightly under 13 percent of Americans were of African ancestry, and that proportion was expected to continue to increase slowly until the middle of the new century. Geographical Distribution By the time of the American Revolution, slavery was concentrated in the plantation-farming regions of the South. Virginia, with an economy based on tobacco production, was one of the African American population centers. Rice and sugarcane in South Carolina and Louisiana were tended by slaves. With the invention of the cotton gin during the 1790’s, cotton became a highly profitable plantation crop and its cultivation rapidly spread throughout the South. The concentration of slave labor in the South meant that African Americans were also concentrated

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Geographical Distribution of African Americans, 1870-2002 Year

Northeast

Midwest

South

West

1870

4.4

4.8

90.6

<0.1%

1880

3.4

5.4

91.2

<0.1%

1890

3.6

5.8

90.3

<0.1%

1900

5.1

5.7

88.8

0.3

1910

5.3

5.9

88.1

0.8

1920

6.9

7.2

85.2

0.6

1930

9.6

10.6

78.7

1.0

1940

10.3

11.3

76.9

1.5

1950

12.8

13.5

70.2

3.5

1960

16.1

18.2

60.6

5.1

1970

19.7

19.3

54.1

6.9

1980

18.0

20.4

53.4

8.2

1990

15.5

16.2

58.7

9.6

2000

17.6

18.8

54.8

8.9

2002

18.1

18.1

55.3

8.6

Source: Steven Ruggles et al., Integrated Public Use Microdata Series: Version 3.0 (Minneapolis: Minnesota Population Center, 2004); Jesse McKinnon, The Black Population in the United States (U.S. Census Bureau, Current Population Reports, March 2002).

there. In 1800, 92.7 percent of all people classified as “black” by the U.S. Census in that year lived in southern states. Some southern states had fairly large free black populations. In 1850, Maryland, which is considered a “border” southern state, had 74,723 free blacks—the largest number of any state at that time. Virginia, with a free black population of 54,333, had the second largest number. A few northern states also had significant numbers of free black residents. Pennsylvania’s 53,626 free blacks in 1850 made it home to the third-largest free black population in the country. During that same year, New York, with 49,069 “free colored” people had the fourth-largest group.

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After the Civil War, African Americans were no longer slaves, but they remained overwhelmingly concentrated in the South. In 1870, more than nine of every ten African Americans still lived in the South, and this continued to be true throughout the nineteenth century. The first “Great Migration” from the South to northern cities took place during the early twentieth century, particularly during and just after World War I. One of the primary northern destinations of black southerners was the city of Chicago. In part, the popularity of Chicago was a result of the work of Robert S. Abbott, a businessman and publisher of the widely read newspaper the Chicago Defender. On May 15, 1917, Abbott began promoting what he called “The Great Northern Drive,” a campaign urging the oppressed people of the South to move north. Chicago’s African American population more than doubled during the second decade of the twentieth century: from 44,000 in 1910 to 109,000 in 1920. Over the following ten years, it more than doubled again, to 234,000. Movement to northern cities such as Chicago transformed the national distribution of African Americans. By 1930, few than 79 percent of African Americans were still living in the South. About one out of every ten lived in the Northeast, and one out of every ten lived in the Midwest. During the 1930’s, the northward migration began to slow. Plantation owners resisted the loss of sharecroppers and other laborers. As northern jobs grew scarce during the Depression years, the attraction of Chicago and other northern cities diminished. The next great shift in the distribution of African Americans occurred during World War II and the years following it. Between 1940 and 1970, an estimated 5,000,000 African Americans left the southern countryside for the cities of the North. In 1940, nearly 77 percent of all African Americans still lived in the South; by 1950, this figure had dropped slightly more than 70 percent and by 1960 to slightly more than 60 percent. By 1970, 1 in 5 African Americans lived in the Northeast and 1 in 5 lived in the Midwest. The West showed an even higher rate of increase. Before World War II, slightly fewer than 2 percent of the entire African American population lived in the West; by 1990, nearly 10 percent lived there.

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Despite these changes, by the early years of the twenty-first century, a majority of African Americans still lived in the South. Even within the South, however, there had been a great change in where people lived. African Americans began the twentieth century living primarily in the southern countryside; they began the twenty-first century residing mostly in city centers. From the Country to the City Before 1920, most Americans of all races lived in rural areas. African Americans, however, were even more likely than others to live in the countryside. In 1870, nearly 87 percent of African Americans were rural residents, compared to about 72 percent of white Americans. The 1920 census was the first to show a majority of Americans living in or around cities. In that year, close to two-thirds of African Americans still lived in rural areas, though. Until World War II, African Americans remained more likely than whites to live in the country, and a majority of African Americans were rural residents. After the war, both tendencies began to change rapidly. From 1940 to 2000, the proportion of African Americans living in rural areas went steadily down, from just above 50 percent to only about 10 percent. The proportion of white rural residents were 38-39 percent in 1940 and 1950, and that proportion fluctuated around 25 percent from 1960 to 2000. The disappearance of agricultural jobs encouraged the movement of African Americans to cities. By the 1960’s, the sharecropper system, under which landless farmers paid landowners for the use of land with a large share of harvests, had virtually disappeared in most of the South. Mechanization had reduced the need for human labor. In 1967, the U.S. government included agricultural workers under its minimum wage law. As a result, farmworkers immediately became much more expensive for southern planters, who became even more dependent on machines and used more chemical herbicides, instead of field workers, to combat weeds. After centuries of heavy African American concentration in agriculture, agricultural jobs were finally disappearing. African Americans went through a dramatic demographic change, from an almost entirely rural group at the beginning of the twentieth century to an almost entirely urban group at the

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Percentages of African Americans and White Americans Living in Central Cities, 1870-2002 African Year American White 1870

4.7

13.7

1880

5.8

15.8

1890

NA

NA

1900

11.0

23.9

1910

15.5

28.1

1920

21.3

31.9

1930

NA

NA

1940

27.5

28.6

1950

33.2

26.4

1960

47.1

26.2

1970

NA

NA

1980

57.2

23.9

1990

54.9

22.4

2000

52.7

21.3

2002

51.5

21.1

Source: Steven Ruggles et al., Integrated Public Use Microdata Series: Version 3.0 (Minneapolis: Minnesota Population Center, 2004); Jesse McKinnon, The Black Population in the United States (U.S. Census Bureau, Current Population Reports, March 2002).

century’s end. Moreover, African Americans became concentrated in the central areas of cities. In the late nineteenth century, about 1 in 20 African Americans lived in a central city. Until 1950, fewer African Americans than whites lived in central city areas. By the beginning of the twenty-first century, however, more than half of all African Americans not only lived in urban areas, but lived in the centers of urban areas. This contrasts with a figure of only about 20 percent for white urban residents. This concentra-

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tion of African Americans in urban cores and the residences of whites in suburbs meant that white and black American residents of the same cities often lived in completely separate neighborhoods. By the end of the twentieth century in 2000, African Americans constituted majorities in many large cities. With an 84-percent African American population, Gary, Indiana, led the nation. Other cities with black majorities included Detroit, Michigan (82 percent); Birmingham, Alabama (74 percent); Jackson, Mississippi (71 percent); New Orleans, Louisiana (67 percent); Baltimore, Maryland (64 percent); Atlanta, Georgia (61 percent); Memphis, Tennessee (61 percent); Washington, D.C. (60 percent); and Richmond, Virginia (57 percent). Age, Family Size, and Family Structure During the twentieth century, the average age of all Americans rose. This was true for African Americans, as well as others, but African Americans have tended to be slightly younger than the majority white population. In the year 1900, the median age of African Americans was 19 years, meaning that the numbers of people above and below that age were equal. At that same time, the median age of whites was 23. During the second half of the twentieth century, the aging of the population was briefly reversed by the so-called post-World War II “baby boom,” which lasted until the early 1960’s. As the baby boomers themselves aged, however, the average age of Americans again rose. In 1970, the median age of African Americans was 21 and that of whites was 28. By the year 2000, the median age of white Americans was 38 and that of African Americans was 30. One reason that African Americans have tended to be somewhat younger than other Americans is that they have generally had somewhat larger family sizes. In 1900, the average African American family contained 5.41 members, while the average white family contained 5.13. By 2000, these figures had dropped to 3.32 for African Americans and 3.02 for whites. Despite the fact that African Americans have continued to have larger families than the majority population, these families

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actually contained fewer adult members. In 1900, nearly 90 percent of white children and nearly 78 percent of African American children lived in families containing both mothers and fathers. During the 1960’s, however, family structures in American society began to change rapidly, particularly among African Americans. By 2000, only 41 percent of African American children lived in two-parent families. The largest proportion, 47 percent, lived in families with only a mother. Another 6 percent lived in families with only a father and 6 percent (mostly older teenagers) lived in households with no parents present. Educational Attainment and Income In 1870, five years after the end of slavery in the United States, only about 1 in 4 African Americans could read and write, and only about 1 of every 10 African American children between the ages of 6 and 12 was attending school. By 1920, 3 out of every 4 African Americans could both read and write, and nearly 80 percent of elementary school-age children were attending school. Despite the rapid historical advancement in education, however, African Americans have continued to be at a disadvantage in educational attainment. In 2000, only 13 percent of African American men above age 25 had college degrees, while 15 percent of African American women over 25 had finished bachelors or advanced degrees. These figures indicate that large numbers of African Americans attained high levels of formal education; however, their proportions remained substantially below those of the white population. More than one-fourth (26 percent) of white men and nearly one-fourth (23 percent) of white women over 25 completed college educations. A lower average level of education was one of the reasons African Americans received less income than other Americans, although some social scientists argue that continuing racial discrimination was a more important factor. In 2000, the median family income of all Americans exceeded $50,000, but the figure for African American families was only $33,255. African American family incomes represented about 62 percent of white family incomes. However, comparisons of only families containing two married partners narrowed the gap considerably, with African

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American families bringing home a median income of $50,690, compared to $59,199 for white families. Future Trends In the year 2005, the size of the African American population was expected to continue to grow. However, other segments of the American population are also expected to grow, so that the African American proportion of the total population should not change dramatically. Projections by the U.S. Bureau of the Census estimate that African Americans will number about 61 million, just under 15 percent of the total population in the year 2050. Much of the future population growth is expected to be the result of more rapid growth of other nonwhite groups, especially Latinos and Asians, who were the most numerous immigrants to the United States during the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. Although some movement to the suburbs may be expected in years to come, especially as the size of the African American middle class grows, African Americans will probably continue to be more likely than the majority of the U.S. population to live in the central parts of cities. Those in the central cities are likely to face continuing economic problems and difficulties in finding jobs. Carl L. Bankston III Further Reading Berlin, Ira. Generations of Captivity: A History of African American Slaves. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2003. Provides an examination of the factors shaping the growth of the African American population during the years of slavery. McKinnon, Jesse. The Black Population: 2000. Washington, D.C.: U.S. Census Bureau, 2001. The U.S. Census Bureau is the main source of demographic information on the United States, and McKinnon’s book is the best place to begin an examination of the African American population. This short publication can be found in most libraries that contain census materials. It is also freely available online at the bureau’s Web site. Massey, Douglas S., and Nancy A. Denton. American Apartheid: Segregation and the Making of an Underclass. Cambridge, Mass.:

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Harvard University Press, 1993. Covers the growth of segregation and its impact on African American employment, housing, and incomes during the twentieth century. Patillo-McCoy, Mary. Black Picket Fences: Privilege and Peril Among the Black Middle Class. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999. Interesting and well-written examination of the lives of members of the African American middle class. See also Agriculture; Black flight; Economic trends; Great Migration; One-drop rule; Slavery

Disfranchisement laws in Mississippi The Law: Laws to disfranchise African Americans had a number of components, the most important of which were a literacy test and a poll tax Date: August, 1890 In August, 1890, the Mississippi legislature passed laws that effectively eliminated the black vote in the state. At the end of the nineteenth century, Mississippi and South Carolina had the largest black populations in the United States. In 1890, fifty-seven of every hundred Mississippians were black. The Fifteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution (ratified in 1870) provided that no state could deny the right to vote on account of race; thus, Mississippi had a large black electorate. During the early 1870’s, Mississippi voters elected hundreds of black officeholders, including members of Congress, state legislators, sheriffs, county clerks, and justices of the peace. In the mid-1870’s, white Democrats launched a counteroffensive, using threats, violence, and fraud to neutralize the African American vote. After 1875, very few African Americans held office in Mississippi. By 1890, many politicians in Mississippi were calling for a convention to write a new constitution for the state. They complained that although only a small number of African Americans were voting, this small number could prove decisive in close elections. Many white leaders feared that black votes could decide

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close elections and worked toward a new constitution with provisions that effectively would disfranchise black voters. It would be difficult to draft such provisions, however, without running afoul of the Fifteenth Amendment. The state’s two senators illustrated the divisions of opinion that were so widespread among white Mississippians. Senator Edward C. Walthall argued against a constitutional convention, warning that it would only excite political passions for no good purpose. He felt certain there was no way to eliminate black political participation without violating the Fifteenth Amendment, and that if Mississippi made such an attempt, the U.S. government would show new interest in enforcing African American voting rights. On the other hand, Senator James George attacked the old constitution, claiming that it had been drafted by carpetbaggers and ignorant former slaves. George urged that the “best citizens” should now take the opportunity to draft a new state constitution. He warned that black voting could revive unless the state took measures to reduce the black electorate by provisions of the state’s highest law. A bill calling a constitutional convention passed both houses of the state legislature in 1888, but Governor Robert Lowry vetoed it, warning that it was better to accept the state’s existing problems than to run the risk of creating new ones by tampering with the state’s constitution. Two years later, a similar bill passed both houses of the legislature, and the new governor, John M. Stone, signed the law. Election of delegates was set for July 29, 1890. The voters would elect 134 delegates, 14 of them from the state at large and the rest apportioned among the counties. The state’s weak Republican Party (to which many African Americans adhered as the party that had freed them from slavery) decided not to field a slate of candidates for at-large delegates. In heavily black Bolivar County, Republicans did offer a local delegate slate with one black and one white candidate. In Jasper County, the white Republican candidate for delegate, F. M. B. “Marsh” Cook, was assassinated while riding alone on a country road. In two black-majority counties, the Democrats allowed white conservative Republicans onto their candidate slates. In several counties, Democrats split into two factions and

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offered the voters a choice of two Democratic tickets. As it turned out, the constitutional convention was made up almost exclusively of white Democrats. The membership included only three Republicans, three delegates elected as independents, and one member of an agrarian third party. Only one of the 134 delegates was black: Isaiah T. Montgomery of Bolivar County. The Mississippi Plan Delegates elected the conservative lawyer Solomon S. Calhoon as president of the convention and immediately set about their work. Convention members had no shortage of ideas on how to limit the suffrage almost exclusively to whites without violating the Fifteenth Amendment. Some suggested that voters must own land, which few African Americans in Mississippi did. Others favored educational tests, since African Americans, only a generation removed from slavery, had had fewer educational opportunities than whites and therefore were often illiterate. As finally devised, the Mississippi plan for disfranchisement had a number of parts, the most important of which were a literacy test and a poll tax. Under the literacy test, the would-be voter must either be able to read or to explain a part of the state constitution when it was read to him. This latter provision, the so-called “understanding clause,” was included as a loophole for illiterate whites. Delegates knew that voting registrars could give easy questions to white applicants and exceedingly difficult ones to African Americans. The poll tax provision stated that a person must pay a poll tax of at least two dollars per year, for at least two years in succession, in order to qualify to vote. The voter would have to pay these taxes well in advance of the election and keep the receipt. The tax was quite burdensome in a state where tenant farmers often earned less than fifty dollars in cash per year. Because Mississippi’s African Americans were often tenant farmers, poorer than their white counterparts, it was thought they would give up the right to vote rather than pay this new tax. The Effect In a notable speech, the black Republican delegate, Isaiah T. Montgomery, announced that he would vote for these new suf-

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frage provisions. He noted that race relations in the state had grown tense and that black political participation in the state had often led whites to react violently. His hope now, Montgomery explained, was that black disfranchisement would improve race relations and as the years passed, perhaps more African Americans would be permitted to vote. The new constitution passed the convention with only eight dissenting votes; it was not submitted to the voters for their ratification. The new suffrage provisions went into effect just before the 1892 elections. The new voter registration requirements disfranchised the great majority of African Americans in the state; they also resulted in the disfranchisement of about fifty-two thousand whites. The new registration resulted in a list of seventy thousand white voters and only nine thousand African American voters. The predominantly black state Republican Party had won 26 percent of the vote for its presidential candidate in 1888; after the new registration, in 1892, the Republican standard-bearer won less than 3 percent. Under the Constitution of 1890, Mississippi had an almost exclusively white electorate for three-quarters of a century. This constitution served as a model for other southern states, which eagerly copied the literacy test, the understanding clause, and the poll tax into their state constitutions. Only after passage of new laws by the U.S. Congress in 1964 and 1965 would African American voters again make their strength felt in southern elections. Stephen Cresswell Further Reading Stephen Cresswell’s Multiparty Politics in Mississippi, 18771902 (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1995) discusses the drafting of the 1890 constitution and its role in limiting the success of the Republican and Populist Parties. Albert D. Kirwan’s Revolt of the Rednecks: Mississippi Politics, 1876-1925 (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1951) remains the basic political history for the period before, during, and after the state’s 1890 constitutional convention. J. Morgan Kousser’s The Shaping of Southern Politics: Suffrage Restriction and the Establishment of the One-Party South, 1880-1910 (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University

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Press, 1974) is a detailed explanation of how new constitutions in Mississippi and other southern states led to a homogeneous electorate, essentially a small clique of middle-class whites. See also Black codes; Civil Rights Acts of 1866-1875; Civil Rights cases; Clinton massacre; Compromise of 1877; Council of Federated Organizations; Fourteenth Amendment; Freedmen’s Bureau; Gerrymandering; Ku Klux Klan; Plessy v. Ferguson; Reconstruction; Smith v. Allwright; Thirteenth Amendment

Draft riots The Event: Wide-scale racial disturbances in New York City prompted by the federal government’s first conscription act Date: July, 1863 Place: New York, New York Estimates of the casualties in the violence range up to more than one thousand. In spite of the violence, the federal government was determined to enforce the draft with even more vigor. The firing on Fort Sumter on April 12, 1861, at the beginning of the Civil War, came at a time when the regular U.S. Army numbered only about 16,000 officers and troops. The traditional method of increasing the size of the army was to expand the state militias and to form a volunteer emergency national army recruited through the states. The immediate response of President Abraham Lincoln to the firing on Fort Sumter was to call for 75,000 militia volunteers for three months’ service. This call was exceeded, and some volunteers were turned away because the expectation was that a show of force would be sufficient to defeat the South. Congress and the president subsequently found it necessary, however, to call for more volunteers. Repeated defeats of the Union army and the resultant loss of men caused President Lincoln to call for 300,000 volunteers in the summer of 1862. The difficulty of obtaining volunteers was soon apparent; bounties were increased, and the threat of the draft was invoked. Congress passed the Militia Act of July, 1862, which allowed the

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states to draft men into the militia and encouraged enlistments. President Lincoln called for another 300,000 men to be enrolled into the militia. Although the Militia Act of 1862 gave the federal government power to enroll men in situations where the state machinery was inadequate, the short-term (nine-month maximum) nature of the militia draft and the inequities of the system made it less than satisfactory. Conscription Begins Spurred by the loss of 75,000 men, by news of a conscription law passed by the Confederacy, and by the failure of the states to provide men promptly for the various calls, Congress passed its own Conscription Act on March 3, 1863. Henry Wilson, chairman of the Senate Committee on Military Affairs, was responsible for the introduction of a bill that eventually was passed and labeled “An Act for Enrolling and Calling Out the National Forces and for Other Purposes.” This act was the first national draft law in the history of the nation. It called for the creation of the “national forces,” which were to consist of all able-bodied male citizens and alien declarants between twenty and forty-five years of age, including African Americans. White opposition to African Americans in federal army uniforms noticeably lessened as a result of the draft. In all, more than 168,000 African American recruits were drafted. Certain high officials, medically unfit persons, and hardship cases were exempted. Exemption could also be obtained by paying three hundred dollars or by securing a substitute. The system was operated by the War Department under the direction of Colonel James B. Fry, provost-marshal-general. Provost-marshals were appointed in districts similar to the congressional districts and enrollments began. Quotas were established, and credit was given for enlistments. If the quotas were not met, drawings were held to determine who should be drafted. Small cards were placed in sealed envelopes in a large trunk, and the names were drawn in public by a trustworthy citizen wearing a blindfold. The system of paying three hundred dollars for exemption from service subsequently was abolished, but the privilege of hiring a substitute was continued. The names

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of more than three million men were gathered, but only about 170,000 were drafted, and 120,000 of those produced substitutes. The primary intent for passage of the law was to speed up voluntary enlistment, and more than one million men enlisted. The chief motivation for these enlistments was probably the threat of the draft. Opposition The draft brought President Lincoln and Secretary of War Edwin McMasters Stanton into conflict with state governors. Those governors who were unenthusiastic about the conduct of the war openly criticized the president and the draft, while governors who favored a more vigorous prosecution of the war often complained that their states had not been given full credit for previous enlistments. Lincoln and Stanton often temporized with the governors by granting postponements or additional credits as the end of the war drew near. There was considerable resistance to the draft. Pennsylvania, Illinois, Indiana, and Kentucky had problems with enrollment, and draft offices and officers were attacked in those states. The Irish in New York and New Jersey were particularly incensed by the draft, many viewing the conflicts as a rich man’s war and a poor man’s fight. With fifty-one categories of diseases qualifying men for medical exemption, the system was fraught with medical resistance problems. Surgeons administering medical qualifying exams were confronted by faked hernias (the most widespread cause of exemption), eye problems caused by applying eye irritants, and pretended deafness. Giving incorrect birth dates, claiming false dependents, and even the enrollment of dead people were other methods of noncompliance. Finally, there were the runaways. Given time to settle their affairs before departing for camp, a considerable number of draftees either relocated or fled to Canada. With the public generally hostile to the draft, the best way for a community to avoid it was to fill the quota with volunteers. Consequently, bounty taxes were implemented to raise revenues to attract foreigners, new immigrants, and the poverty-stricken to enlist. The paying of bounties corrupted the draft system. It pro-

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duced bounty jumpers who, attracted by lump-sum payments, were willing to jump off trains or boats to escape conscription. Riots Notorious resistance to the draft instigated the draft riots in New York City. Governor Horatio Seymour’s speech of July 4, 1863, attacking the Lincoln administration for violations of individual liberty, did nothing to decrease the hostility of the New York Irish toward African Americans and the abolitionists. Antidraft rioting, which took place between July 13 and 15, destroyed property and physically harmed many African Americans. Some New York militia units that had been engaged at Gettysburg were hastily ordered back to New York to stop the rioting. Estimates of the casualties in the violence range up to more than one thousand. In spite of the violence, the federal government was determined to enforce the draft with even more fervor. Confederacy and Conscription The Confederacy’s calls for volunteers and its national conscription law antedated those of the Union. Jefferson Davis’s call for 100,000 volunteers came before the firing on Fort Sumter, and the Conscription Act was passed on April 16, 1862, almost a year before similar legislation was passed by the United States. The Confederate act conscripted men from eighteen to thirty-five years of age; later the same year, it was extended to include those between seventeen and fifty years of age. The Confederate law included a substitute system and a controversial list of exempted persons held to be essential at home. The category that caused the most discussion was that which exempted one slave owner or overseer for each twenty slaves. The Confederate draft was also controversial because it was a national levy; it made no concession to the doctrine of states’ rights for which most southerners claimed to be fighting. It appears that the Confederacy’s early use of a conscription law enabled General Robert E. Lee’s armies to continue their general success in the Civil War well into 1863. It was only after the North also began drafting men that President Lincoln could be confident of victory. The North, with a much larger population,

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was able to sustain its losses and to continue the war indefinitely; the Confederacy could not. Continuance of the draft underscored Northern determination to continue the war to its conclusion. The result was Lee’s surrender at Appomattox and the restoration of the Union. Mark A. Plummer Updated by Irwin Halfond Further Reading Iver Charles Bernstein’s The New York City Draft Riots: Their Significance for American Society and Politics in the Age of the Civil War (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990) is a detailed, highly readable study of the Civil War’s worst draft riot. James W. Geary’s We Need Men: The Union Draft in the Civil War (Dekalb: Illinois University Press, 1991) is an extensively footnoted study of the draft law’s origins, operation, and effects. Stephen M. Kohn’s Jailed for Peace: The History of American Draft Law Violation, 16581985 (New York: Praeger, 1987) is a thorough study of resistance to compulsory conscription from colonial to recent times. See also Charleston race riots; Civil War; Emancipation Proclamation; Race riots of 1866

Dyer antilynching bill The Law: Bill seeking to make lynching a national crime subject to federal prosecution and penalty Date: January, 1922 The bill languished in the Senate and ultimately failed as did two subsequent antilynching bills. After World War I, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) sought congressional sponsors for federal antilynching legislation. More than three thousand people, mostly African Americans, had been lynched between 1889 and 1918. Of sixty-nine lynchings in 1921, 92 percent targeted African Americans. In April, 1921, President Warren Harding re-

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quested that Congress pass antilynching legislation. Representative L. C. Dyer of Missouri introduced a bill that made lynching a national crime subject to federal prosecution and penalty. The House in January, 1922, easily adopted the Dyer bill, 220 to 119. The Dyer bill languished in the Senate Judiciary Committee. Southern senators opposed the federal government’s interference with the police powers of the states. The Dyer bill finally reached the Senate floor at a special session on the ship subsidy bill in November, 1922. The NAACP intensified its efforts to secure passage of the Dyer measure, sending senators a memo, signed by numerous professionals, urging adoption. Southern and border senators, led by Oscar Underwood of Alabama and Pat Harrison of Mississippi, filibustered the Dyer bill for a week. Republican senators at a December caucus abandoned their efforts to secure approval of the Dyer bill, clearing the way for Sen-

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ate consideration of the ship subsidy bill. Other antilynching bills, including the Costigan-Wagner bill of 1935 and the WagnerGavagan bill of 1940, likewise failed. David L. Porter See also Clinton massacre; Ku Klux Klan; Lynching; Till lynching; United States v. Cruikshank

Economic trends Burdened by being held in involuntary servitude throughout most of their long history in North America, African Americans have been at the bottom of the income scale; however, since the mid-twentieth century, their economic condition has steadily improved, helping them to close the gap with the rest of the population In the year 1860—the last before the Civil War—the U.S. Census counted a population of 4,441,830 African Americans in the United States. At that time, 9 of every 10 of those people were considered to be the property of others. Legally, they were slaves. Most people held in slavery worked in agriculture, but a small number in urban areas worked in trades or as laborers. Slavery Slaves tended many of the country’s most important export crops. Tobacco, one of the earliest cash crops in Virginia and the surrounding regions, depended heavily on slave labor. Later, rice, grown in parts of South Carolina and other states, and sugarcane, grown chiefly in Louisiana, became important cash crops grown by slaves. With the development of the cotton gin at the end of the eighteenth century, cotton became the most profitable agricultural export of the entire United States. Even in the nonslaveholding North, much of the profit that made industrialization possible came from trade in crops produced by slaves. The slave trade itself was a significant part of the early American economy. In 1807, the U.S. Congress pass legislation banning

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the importation of slaves from abroad, beginning the following year. From that date, American involvement in the international slave trade dropped substantially. However, the internal trade in slaves continued. As the United States spread westward and as the cotton industry grew in the deeper South, the sale of slaves from older, upper South states to Deep South states became a major economic activity. The relatively small number of African Americans who were not slaves—the so-called free blacks—occupied positions that were mostly at the bottom of the economic ladder. The 1860 census counted 488,070 “free colored” people in the United States, a little more than one-third of whom were of mixed race, according to census data. More than 70 percent of the free blacks worked in only four occupations: as laborers, domestic household and laundry workers, salaried farmworkers, and independent farmers. The most common category, accounting for 26 percent of all workers, was “laborer.” Only about 7 percent of all free black workers in the United States were owners or tenant farmers, compared to one-third of all whites. The small number of free African Americans also owned relatively little property just before the Civil War. Among free African American men over twenty-one years of age, 83 percent owned no real estate, such as a house or land, and 63 percent owned no personal property of recordable value. By comparison, just under 58 percent of adult white men owned no real estate and just under 37 percent had no personal property. The small number of free African Americans who did own possessions of substantial value had only a fraction of the wealth of whites. Among those the census referred to as “free colored” adult men who owned some real property, the median value of the property was $500, compared to $1,500 for white men. The median value of personal property of free men of color with property was just $100, compared to $370 for whites. On the eve of the Civil War, then, slave labor was a key part of the developing American economy. Only about 10 of every 100 African Americans were part of the free labor force, though. Moreover, those who were free worked mostly in menial occupations and received little of the nation’s wealth.

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Reconstruction Reconstruction was the period just after the Civil War when the southern states were occupied by northern military forces, as the U.S. government attempted to bring about some political and social change in the South. After the U.S. Congress took control of Reconstruction policies away from President Andrew Johnson in 1867, the federal government made efforts to include African Americans in public life. During the late 1860’s and 1870’s, African Americans were elected to public offices throughout the South. The Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen, and Abandoned Lands (known as the Freedmen’s Bureau) tried to improve the economic situation of former slaves by negotiating labor contracts for them with plantation owners and by setting up schools. While Reconstruction did bring about some political participation for African Americans, it brought about little real economic change for them. Most African Americans remained at the bottom of the job market and worked on farms owned by other people. In 1870, just over half of the working African Americans in the United States (52 percent) were farm laborers. The next most common occupation was in domestic service, as private

In 1900 Booker T. Washington (seated, second from left) and T. Thomas Fortune founded the National Negro Business League to promote black enterprise. (Library of Congress)

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household workers (13 percent), followed by unclassified laborers (12 percent). Another 11 percent were farm owners or tenants working farms belonging to others. By 1880, the percentage of farmers had almost doubled, to 19 percent. However, many of these farmers were sharecroppers, participants in a farming system that began to evolve in the wake of slavery. Sharecroppers worked lands belonging to others, generally white owners, handing over large portions of their crops to the owners after each harvest. The most common occupation for African Americans in 1880 was still that of farm laborer (36 percent), the percentage of general laborers had gone up to 20 percent. Another 14 percent of African Americans were in domestic service after the end of Reconstruction. The United States was primarily an agricultural society during the years following the Civil War. During the 1870’s and 1880’s, about 43 percent of white Americans were in agriculture. However, African Americans were even more heavily concentrated in this industry, since 64 percent in 1870 and 65 percent in 1880 were in agriculture. The only other industry containing many African Americans was that of private household service, which contained about 14 percent of African American workers in 1870 and 19 percent in 1880. Well over three-quarters of the African American workers toiled in either low-level farmwork or domestic service during and after the years of Reconstruction Jim Crow Era Reconstruction ended with the withdrawal of federal troops from the southern states in 1877. Afterward, the U.S. economy began a period of rapid expansion and industrialization. The growth of the railroads, manufacturing, mining, and banking propelled the nation toward an urban, factory-based economy. Much of the new workforce for this industrializing nation came from immigration, though, not from African Americans, who continued to be concentrated in agriculture in the South. By 1910, nearly 90 percent of African Americans still lived in the South and a majority of all African Americans were still employed in agriculture, although only about one-third of all Americans and one-fourth to one-third of white Americans worked in agricul-

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ture. Most African Americans continued to work on land belonging to others. Of those who worked in agriculture in 1910, 70 percent were farm laborers and wage workers, working for land owners for pay or a share of the harvest. Many of these were sharecroppers, who had no money to rent land. The sharecropping system emerged during and after Reconstruction. Most African Americans in the South were landless and had neither tools nor money. Landowners often could not afford to hire workers, or they found it more profitable to make use of workers they would not have to pay. Agricultural laborers moved onto land on which the owners provided small houses and tools. In return, the workers were obligated to turn over portions of their crops—usually from 20 to 50 percent—to the owners. Meanwhile, the owners extended credit for seed and living expenses until the harvests. Because the landowners kept the records of debts, sharecroppers were often overcharged when the harvest times arrived and lost even greater portions of the crops than originally agreed. Although there were also many white sharecroppers, African Americans were particularly concentrated in this kind of work. Among the African American workers who were not in agriculture in 1910, over one-third (mostly women) were doing laundry in private homes or working as domestic servants. Another one-fourth of those outside agriculture were laborers. The concentration of African Americans in low-paying, manual labor was the economic side of the “Jim Crow” system in the United States. This was a name given to the system of maintaining racial inequality through laws requiring racial segregation, through limiting the rights of African Americans to vote and participate in government at all levels, and through occupational and housing discrimination. The First Great Migration The movement of African Americans from the rural South to the industrial North is often called the Great Migration. That migration actually unfolded in two great waves. The first took place during and after World War I and the second during and after World War II. World War I began to break the hold of the rural

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South on African Americans and to offer economic opportunities in places where they would have greater freedom from the Jim Crow system. As many men entered the military during the war and industries began hiring in greater numbers to meet the needs of the war-driven economy, new opportunities for employment for relatively unskilled workers opened up in the North. Although plantation owners in the South often resisted the loss of their workers, the lure of job opportunities and freedom from oppression drew many people northward. One of the primary northern destinations of southern African Americans was the city of Chicago. In part, the popularity of Chicago was partly a result of the work of Robert S. Abbott, a businessman and publisher of the widely read newspaper the Chicago Defender. Abbott began “The Great Northern Drive” on May 15, 1917, urging the oppressed people of the South to move North. The African American population of Chicago more than doubled during the second decade of the twentieth century: from 44,000 in 1910 to 109,000 in 1920. Over the following ten years, it more than doubled again, to 234,000. By 1930, over 1 in 5 African Americans lived in the Northeast or Midwest. Despite the Great Migration, most African Americans continued to live in the South, and agriculture continued to be a major economic activity for them. Nevertheless, by 1920 the majority of African Americans no longer worked in agriculture. However, even outside the South, they continued to hold positions at the bottom of the occupational ladder. One in 4 African Americans worked as laborers in 1920, compared to less than 1 of every 10 whites. During this period, portering jobs in hotels, on trains, and in other places emerged as a major occupational opportunity for African Americans. In 1920, 3 percent of all African American men and about 10 percent of African American men outside the South worked as porters. Sleeping car porter positions on trains became prestigious and valued jobs for people who were shut out of most other jobs in American society, and they attracted some of the best-educated men in African American society. The Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters became one of the most active and effec-

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tive black labor unions, and it was an early leader in the struggle for civil rights. The Second Great Migration During the 1930’s, the movement northward began to slow. Plantation owners in the South resisted the loss of sharecroppers and other laborers. As northern jobs grew scarce during the Depression years, the attraction of northern cities such as Chicago diminished. After World War II, though, the Great Migration began again, at a much greater level. Between 1940 and 1970, an estimated five million African Americans left the southern countryside for the cities of the North. The northward migration led to a steady growth of African Americans living in the Northeast and the northern part of the Midwest. While over three-quarters of African Americans (77 percent) lived in the South in 1940, just over one-half (54 percent) lived in the South in 1970. At the same time, both the movement north and a movement to cities in the South transformed African Americans from a predominantly rural population to an urban population. This affected their positions in the American economy, since it placed them in cities at the moment when urban manufacturing jobs were beginning to decline as part of the American economy. The Postindustrial Economy By the 1960’s, the sharecropper system had virtually disappeared in most of the South. Mechanization had reduced the need for human labor in agriculture. In 1967, the U.S. government included agricultural workers under its minimum wage law. As a result, farmworkers immediately became much more expensive for southern planters, who relied even more on machines and began substituting chemicals for human laborers to eliminate weeds. After centuries of heavy concentration in agriculture, jobs as agricultural workers had finally become largely unavailable for African Americans. This did mean that they were no longer locked in to the kinds of rural labor that had held so many of their ancestors through the centuries of slavery and the decades of segregation following slavery. At the same time, however, the entire

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national economy was changing. After around 1970, factories located in cities became less important parts of American economic life, so that even factory jobs were becoming less available. As the old jobs in agriculture declined and African Americans were becoming an urban population, jobs in the cities also declined. One of the consequences of the postindustrial transformation of the American economy, in which jobs in manufacturing decreased, was that the gap between the unemployment rates of African Americans and whites grew even wider. In 1940, as the Depression of the 1930’s drew to an end, African Americans had an unemployment rate of just over 10 percent, while the rate for white Americans was just under 10 percent. By 1970, the overall level of unemployment had gone down, but African Americans had a much higher unemployment rate than whites: over 7 percent for the former and under 3 percent for the latter. As unemployment rates increased through the rest of the twentieth century, unemployment among African Americans grew worse. Their unemployment rates were more than double those of whites through the rest of the century, and African American unemployment rates were consistently higher than they were in the difficult economy of 1940. People are classified as “unemployed” if they are looking for work but do not have jobs. Those who give up looking for work are considered outside the labor force. During the postindustrial period of the American economy, African Americans were much more likely than others to give up looking for work completely. In 1970, 16 percent of African American men between the ages of 25 and 64 who were not in school were out of the labor force, compared to less than 8 percent of white men in the same age range. Rates of labor force nonparticipation went up steadily throughout the twentieth century, so that by the year 2000 one-third of African American men and 15 percent of white men who were not enrolled in school and between 25 years of age and retirement age were outside the labor force. Joblessness had become a serious problem for African Americans. The Black Middle Class and the Underclass Until the 1960’s, widespread social and economic discrimination prevented the growth of a large black middle class. Although

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there were always black business owners and professionals, those people made up only a small part of the African American workforce, who tended to be heavily concentrated in low-income, low-status jobs. In 1960, for example, only 14.4 percent of all African Americans lived in households that enjoyed incomes two times higher than the poverty level, compared to 48 percent of whites. Using a slightly different definition of middle class, author Bart Landry, in his influential book The New Black Middle Class (1987) found that only 13.4 percent of African Americans could be found in middle-class jobs. Even those who were members of the black middle class often had difficulty passing their economic status on to their children. From the early 1960’s, the black middle class began to expand rapidly. By 2000, about half the people of African ancestry in the United States lived in households with incomes twice the poverty level. Although the proportion of whites at this income level had also increased rapidly over the previous four decades, to nearly three-fourths, the economic trend had been one of remarkable upward mobility for a minority group that had earlier had few economic opportunities. A number of researchers have pointed out that government employment is particularly important to the black middle class. In 2000, more than 1 of every 5 employed African Americans worked for federal, state, or local governments, compared to only 14 percent of employed whites. This meant that middle-class African Americans were particularly vulnerable to government cutbacks, and that they had less access to private sector employment, which frequently offered better salaries than public sector jobs. At the same time that the black middle class was growing, many African Americans continued to live in poverty. The percentage of African Americans with household incomes below the official poverty level declined steadily between 1960 and 2000. Nevertheless, nearly 1 African American of every 4 was living in poverty in the year 2000. Even more disturbing, more than 1 in 10 African Americans lived in extreme poverty, with household incomes that were one-half the poverty level or below, at the turn of the twenty-first century.

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Low-income African Americans were heavily concentrated in cities, where employment was often either unavailable or offered few opportunities for advancement. With high rates of unemployment among men in these urban communities, single-parent households headed by women became a common pattern. The urban, economically disadvantaged segment of the African American population was described as the “underclass” by some scholars and journalists. Carl L. Bankston III Further Reading Berlin, Ira. Generations of Captivity: A History of African American Slaves. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2003. Provides an examination of the factors shaping the growth of the African American population during the years of slavery and gives a good view of slavery as an economic and social institution. Foner, Eric. Reconstruction, 1863-1877. New York: Harper & Row, 1988. Looks at efforts of former slaves to be economically selfsupporting and at how the failure of the American government to meet the economic needs of its newly freed citizens produced years of continuing racial inequality. Landry, Bart. The New Black Middle Class. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987. Path-breaking study of the grim economic realities of African American efforts to achieve middleclass status. McKinnon, Jesse. The Black Population: 2000. Washington, D.C.: U.S. Census Bureau, 2001. The U.S. Census Bureau is the main source of demographic information on the United States, and McKinnon’s book is the best place to begin an examination of the African American population. This short publication can be found in most libraries that contain census materials. It is also freely available online at the bureau’s Web site. Massey, Douglas S., and Nancy A. Denton. American Apartheid: Segregation and the Making of an Underclass. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1993. Covers the growth of segregation and its impact on African American employment, housing, and incomes during the twentieth century.

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Patillo-McCoy, Mary. Black Picket Fences: Privilege and Peril Among the Black Middle Class. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999. Interesting and well-written examination of the lives of members of the African American middle class. Waldinger, Roger. Still the Promised City? African-Americans and New Immigrants in Postindustrial New York. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1996. Examines why African Americans had difficulty finding even unskilled jobs in large cities in the years following World War II. See also Agriculture; Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters; Demographic trends; Education; Employment; Equal Employment Opportunity Act of 1972; Equal Employment Opportunity Commission; Fair Employment Practices Committee; Great Migration; Irish and African Americans; Poor People’s March on Washington; Sharecropping

Edmonson v. Leesville Concrete Company The Case: U.S. Supreme Court ruling on jury composition Date: June 3, 1991 The Supreme Court extended its ruling that potential jurors could not be peremptorily excluded on the basis of race from criminal trials to include civil trials. Thaddeus Edmonson, an African American construction worker, sued his employer, the Leesville Concrete Company, in 1988, claiming compensation for injuries suffered in a workplace accident. Edmonson invoked his right to a trial by jury. During the pretrial examination of potential jurors, the company’s lawyers used their peremptory challenges to excuse two of the three black members of the panel. Edmonson asked the district court to require the company to provide a race-neutral explanation of the dismissals of the black panelists. Under Batson v. Kentucky (1986), racial motivation for juror challenges was held unconstitutional

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in criminal cases. In Batson, the U.S. Supreme Court had reasoned that the use of race as a criterion in jury challenges by the prosecution violates the equal protection clause of the U.S. Constitution. Edmonson’s case presented the issue of whether such dismissals are improper in civil cases. The trial court denied Edmonson’s request and, after conflicting decisions in the court of appeals, he appealed to the Supreme Court. In 1991, Justice Anthony Kennedy wrote for the Court in a 6-3 decision holding that racially based juror challenges are unconstitutional even in civil cases. Because the juror challenges use the power of the government to select jury members, the discrimination becomes “state action” even though invoked by a private litigant. All state action must be consistent with constitutional rules forbidding racial discrimination. Justice Sandra Day O’Connor dissented, arguing that only governmental discrimination is forbidden by the equal protection clause and that the act of Leesville Concrete’s counsel was not state action. Robert Jacobs See also Batson v. Kentucky; Moore v. Dempsey; Norris v. Alabama; Powers v. Ohio; Strauder v. West Virginia; Williams v. Mississippi

Education Since the emancipation of the slaves in 1863, the debate has raged over the role of education and educational institutions in the African American community in the United States. After the Civil Rights movement of the 1950’s and 1960’s, the importance of an equal education and performance on standardized testing led the educational community to reevaluate the impact of education and its significance for African American students. The Civil War (1861-1865), Reconstruction (1863-1877), and the Thirteenth Amendment (1865) ended slavery. Although free African Americans had attended schools in some northern states long before the Civil War, southern states had prohibited the teaching

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of either slave or free African American children. Emancipation in 1863 brought with it the challenge of providing educational opportunities for the freed men and women and their children, particularly in the former Confederate states. The Legacy of Slavery In 1865, Congress created the Freedmen’s Bureau to help former slaves adjust to freedom. The bureau continued to function until 1872 and, under the leadership of General O. O. Howard, established schools throughout the South. At their peak in 1869, these schools had about 114,000 students enrolled. The schools taught reading, writing, grammar, geography, arithmetic, and music through a curriculum based on the New England school model. A small number of African American teachers were trained in these schools, but the schools were usually staffed by northern schoolteachers, who brought with them their values, their educational ideas, and their methods. These white educators from northern states promoted the stereotypical idea of the kind of education African Americans should receive. Samuel C. Armstrong and many like-minded educators stressed industrial training and social control over self-determination. Many believe this philosophy was designed to keep African Americans in a subordinate position. From Washington to Du Bois Booker T. Washington was the leading educational spokesperson for African Americans after the Civil War. Washington, who was born a slave, experienced the hectic years of Reconstruction and, in a speech delivered at the Atlanta Exposition in 1895, articulated the outlines of a compromise with the white power structure, a policy later known as accommodationism. A student of Armstrong, Washington believed that industrial education was an important force in building character and economic competence for African Americans. He believed in moral “uplift” through hard work. At the Tuskegee Institute, which he helped establish in 1881, Washington shaped his ideas into a curriculum that focused on basic academic, agricultural, and occupational skills and emphasized the values of hard work and the dignity of

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labor. He encouraged his students to become elementary schoolteachers, farmers, and artisans, emphasizing these occupations over the professions of medicine, law, and politics. Although revered initially, Washington has become an increasingly controversial figure. Some people say he made the best of a bad situation and that, although he compromised on racial issues, he can be viewed as a leader who preserved and slowly advanced the educational opportunities of African Americans. Critics of Washington see him as an opportunist whose compromises restricted African American progress. W. E. B. Du Bois was a sociological and educational pioneer who challenged the established system of education. Du Bois, an opponent of Washington’s educational philosophies, believed the African American community needed more determined and activist leadership. He helped organize the Niagara Movement in 1905, which led to the founding in 1909 of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). Du Bois was a strong opponent of racial segregation in the schools. Unlike Washington, Du Bois did not believe in slow, evolutionary change; he instead demanded immediate change. Du Bois sup-

Facilities such as this southern schoolhouse for African Americans in 1939 made a mockery of the “separate-but-equal” doctrine in education. (Library of Congress)

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ported the NAACP position that all American children, including African American children, should be granted an equal educational opportunity. It was through the efforts of the NAACP that the monumental U.S. Supreme Court case Brown v. Board of Education (1954) outlawed segregation in U.S. public schools. Du Bois believed in educated leadership for the African American community and developed the concept of the Talented Tenth, the notion that 10 percent of the African American population would receive a traditional college education in preparation for leadership. Post-Civil Rights Era Du Bois’s educational and political philosophies had a significant influence on the Civil Rights movement of the 1950’s and 1960’s. Out of the effects of public school desegregation during the 1950’s and 1960’s and the Black Power movement of the 1970’s grew a new perspective on the education of African Americans. Inspired by historians such as Cheikh Anta Diop and Basil Davidson, educational philosophers such as Molefi Kete Asante formed the Afrocentric school of education. Asante and his followers maintain that a curriculum centered on the perspective of African Americans is more effective in reaching African American youth than the Eurocentric curriculum to which most students are exposed. Low test scores and historically poor academic records could be the result, according to Afrocentrists, of a curriculum that does not apply to African American students. Statistics According to The African American Education Data Book (published in 1997 by the Research Institute of the College Fund/ United Negro College Fund), in 1994, approximately 43.5 million students were enrolled in public elementary and secondary schools, and nearly 5 million students were enrolled in private elementary and secondary schools. African Americans represented 16.5 percent of all public school enrollments. African Americans were underrepresented at private elementary and secondary schools, where they constituted only 9.3 percent of all enrollments. The number of African Americans enrolled in public

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schools declined as grade level increased, a finding that supports the evidence that African Americans leave school at higher rates than children of the same age in other racial groups. African Americans represented only 12.5 percent of those who received regular high school diplomas in 1994. In schools made up primarily of African American students and located mainly in economically depressed urban centers, nearly a quarter of all students participated in remedial reading programs, and 22 percent participated in remedial math. By comparison, schools with less than 50 percent African American students had 14.8 percent of students enrolled in remedial reading and 12 percent enrolled in remedial math. Furthermore, only 87 percent of African American high school seniors graduate on time compared with 93 percent of non-African American seniors. Test Scores African American students have historically scored far below whites in geography, writing, reading, and math. The National Educational Longitudinal Study of 1988 reported that the average seventeen-year-old African American student had a reading score only slightly higher than that of the average white thirteenyear-old. Compared with whites, African American Scholastic Aptitude Test (SAT) takers had lower high school grade-point averages, fewer years of academic study, and fewer honors courses. Data collected by the National Assessment of Educational Progress, however, reveal that African Americans had registered gains in reading, math, and other subjects between the 1970’s and the 1990’s. Despite these gains, African Americans are underrepresented among high school seniors applying for college and represented only 9 percent of the college population in the 1990’s (a decrease from 10 percent in the 1970’s). It is not surprising that many African Americans see no value in postsecondary education. Regardless of socioeconomic status or whether they had received a high school diploma, a higher percentage of African Americans who were eighth-graders in 1988 were unemployed and not in college than their white counterparts in 1993, a year after their scheduled high school graduation. Despite affirmative action legislation, African Americans

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still are less likely to be hired for a job when competing against equally qualified white applicants. Socioeconomic Status In both 1980 and 1990, African American high school sophomores were concentrated in the lowest two socioeconomic status quartiles. The proportion of African Americans in the lowest socioeconomic status quartile declined from 48 percent in 1980 to 39 percent in 1990. In both 1980 and 1990, African Americans were underrepresented in the upper two socioeconomic status quartiles. In addition, African Americans often attend schools with fewer resources in poorer neighborhoods of large, urban areas. Fifteen percent of schools that have primarily African American students have no magnet or honors programming, as opposed to only 1.6 percent of schools with a majority of white students. Also, a higher percentage of schools with a majority of African American students participated in the National School Lunch Program. The poverty level in the African American community is one of the factors believed to be responsible for consistently low scores on standardized testing. Along with poverty, the African American community has also experienced a greater amount of violence and delinquency among high-school-age youths. The homicide rate among African American men increased by more than two-thirds in the late 1980’s, according to a study by Joe Schwartz and Thomas Exter (1990). Parental Attitudes Although much of the effort of public policymakers goes into integrating schools and creating more diversity in inner-city schools, African American parents seem more interested in developing a stronger academic program in their children’s schools. A survey taken in 1998 by Public Agenda, a nonpartisan publicopinion research firm, showed that 80 percent of African American parents favored raising academic standards and achievement levels in primarily African American schools over emphasizing integration. Eleven percent of the parents polled said they would like to see the schools both integrated and improved. Of the white parents polled, 60 percent expressed a fear that discipline and

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safety problems, low reading scores, and social problems would result if African American students were transferred to a mostly white school. The Public Agenda survey demonstrates the differences in opinions on education based on racial background. For example, nearly 50 percent of African American parents felt that teachers demanded too little of their children because of the children’s race. Despite the difference in opinion on these public issues, both African American and white parents expressed a great interest in their children’s school success and the quality of their children’s education. Jason Pasch Further Reading A good introduction to the topic can be found in The Encyclopedia of African American Education (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1996), edited by Faustine C. Jones-Wilson. Issues in African American Education (Nashville, Tenn.: One Horn Press, 1991), by Walter Gill, provides good background on the issues surrounding education. Booker T. Washington’s Up from Slavery (New York: Doubleday, 1938) is a classic text on Washington’s educational philosophy and life story. W. E. B. Du Bois’s ideas can be found in The Philadelphia Negro: A Social Study (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1899) and Dusk of Dawn: An Essay Toward an Autobiography of a Race Concept (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1940). The Afrocentric philosophy is described in Molefi Kete Asante’s Kemet, Afrocentricity, and Knowledge (Trenton, N.J.: Africa World Press, 1990). Statistics covering every aspect of African American education can be found in The African American Education Data Book (Research Institute of the College Fund/UNCF, 1997), by Frederick D. Patterson, Michael T. Nettles, and Laura W. Perna. See also Affirmative action; Afrocentrism; Ashmun Institute; Atlanta Compromise; Bakke case; Black colleges and universities; Brown v. Board of Education; Economic trends; Employment; Freedmen’s Bureau; National Association for the Advancement of Colored People; Niagara Movement; School desegregation; Talented Tenth; United Negro College Fund

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Edwards v. South Carolina The Case: U.S. Supreme Court ruling on freedom of assembly Date: February 5, 1963 In this incorporation case, the Supreme Court held that local officials could not block an otherwise lawful demonstration because they disliked the demonstrators’ political views. About two hundred African American students marched peacefully in small groups from a church to the South Carolina state capitol, an obviously public forum, to protest the state’s racially discriminatory laws. A few dozen police officers initially told them they could march peacefully but about an hour later ordered them to disperse under threat of arrest. A crowd had gathered to watch the demonstrators but did not seem threatening, and the police presence was ample. The demonstrators responded by singing patriotic and religious songs until some two hundred demonstrators were arrested and convicted of breach of the peace. Their conviction was upheld by the South Carolina supreme court. The Supreme Court, by an 8-1 vote, reversed the convictions of the civil rights demonstrators. Justice Potter Stewart, in the majority opinion, applied the First Amendment right to freedom of assembly to the states, refusing to let the states bar demonstrations of unpopular views in traditional forums. In line with other time, place, and manner decisions, the Court used the Fourteenth Amendment’s due process clause to incorporate the peaceable assembly portion of the First Amendment and to apply it to the states. Justice Tom C. Clark dissented, defending the state’s action. Richard L. Wilson See also Civil Rights movement; Griffin v. Breckenridge; National Association for the Advancement of Colored People v. Alabama; Wisconsin v. Mitchell

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Emancipation Proclamation The Event: President Abraham Lincoln’s Civil War declaration that slaves in areas in rebellion against the Union states were free Date: January 1, 1863 Place: Washington, D.C. The Emancipation Proclamation freed few slaves at the time Abraham Lincoln issued it, but its symbolic force helped transform the Civil War into a crusade against slavery. Although the American Civil War (1861-1865) was the result of sectional conflict regarding the issue of slavery, both the Union and the Confederate governments initially denied that slavery was a war issue. The Confederate government claimed that it was fighting only to defend the principle of states’ rights. The Union government claimed that it was fighting to preserve the Union of states against Confederate efforts to destroy it. Lincoln’s Cautious Approach to Emancipation From the beginning of the war, abolitionists, Radical Republicans, and black activists urged President Abraham Lincoln to use the war as an opportunity to strike down slavery. Lincoln, though, acted in a cautious manner in the early months of the war. Until September, 1862, Lincoln refused to include the abolition of slavery as one of the Union’s war aims. Furthermore, when radical commanders in the Union army ordered the emancipation of slaves in parts of the occupied South in 1861-1862, Lincoln countermanded the orders. These actions caused reformers to question the depth of Lincoln’s own commitment to antislavery. In Lincoln’s defense, it must be noted that Lincoln both publicly and privately often expressed a heartfelt abhorrence of slavery. Yet Lincoln knew that a premature effort to turn the war into a crusade for emancipation would be counterproductive to the cause of freedom. An early act of emancipation would prompt loyal slave states such as Kentucky, Maryland, and Missouri to join the Confederacy and probably cause the defeat of the Union. From a practical point of view, the Union government could not abolish slavery in the South if it lost the war.

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Decorated text of the Emancipation Proclamation. (Library of Congress)

Origins of Lincoln’s Emancipation Policy Lincoln was finally encouraged to seek emancipation because of the actions of the slaves themselves. During the war, some 600,000 slaves—about 15 percent of the total—escaped from their masters. Slaves understood that the advance of the Union army through the South presented them with an unprecedented opportunity for escape. Most escaped slaves sought shelter with the Union army.

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The presence of large numbers of slaves within Union army lines presented Union commanders with the question of whether the slaves should be returned to their rebellious masters or allowed to stay with the army and use up its scarce resources. Most Union commanders allowed the slaves to remain with the army, justifying this decision out of military necessity. Pointing to the right of armies under international law to seize or destroy enemy property being used to sustain the war effort, Union commanders claimed the right to seize the Confederacy’s slave laborers as contraband of war. The actions of Union commanders shifted the focus of emancipation from human rights to military necessity, thereby encouraging Lincoln to adopt a general policy of emancipation and giving Lincoln an argument with which to win public support for this policy. The Proclamation and Its Limits Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation, which was issued January 1, 1863, declared that slaves in areas in rebellion against the United States were free. Slaves in the loyal slave states and slaves in areas of the Confederacy already under Union control were not freed by the proclamation. Because of this fact, some commentators have criticized the proclamation, claiming that the proclamation had little impact because it sought to free the Confederate slaves who were beyond Lincoln’s control and neglected to free the slaves within his control. This criticism ignores several facts regarding Lincoln’s action. The Emancipation Proclamation amounted to an announcement that henceforward, the Union army would become an army of liberation. Whenever the Union army captured an area of the Confederacy, it would automatically free the slaves in that region. Additionally, the limited scope of Lincoln’s proclamation was prompted by the limited powers of the president under the Constitution. Lincoln pointed out that, as president, his only constitutional power to emancipate slaves was derived from his power as commander in chief to order the military destruction of property that supported the enemy’s war effort. Slaves belonging to masters in states loyal to the Union and slaves belonging to masters in

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areas of the Confederacy previously captured were not currently being used to support the enemy’s war effort. In making this argument, Lincoln was not being evasive or cautious in seeking the emancipation of all American slaves. One month before he issued the Emancipation Proclamation, Lincoln proposed to Congress the passage of a constitutional amendment that would have freed all slaves living in the loyal border states and in currently occupied portions of the Confederacy. Effects of the Proclamation In the end, perhaps two-thirds of American slaves were freed by the Emancipation Proclamation. The remainder of American slaves were freed by the laws of state governments in loyal slave states and by the Thirteenth Amendment (1865), which abolished slavery in the United States. Harold D. Tallant Further Reading Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation: The End of Slavery in America (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2004) by Allen C. Guelzo, Slaves No More: Three Essays on Emancipation and the Civil War (Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1992), by Ira Berlin et al., LaWanda Cox’s Lincoln and Black Freedom: A Study in Presidential Leadership (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1981), Eric Foner’s Nothing But Freedom: Emancipation and Its Legacy (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1983), John Hope Franklin’s The Emancipation Proclamation (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1963), and James M. McPherson’s Ordeal by Fire: The Civil War and Reconstruction (2d ed., New York: McGraw-Hill, 1992) discuss the proclamation and its effects from a variety of viewpoints. See also Abolition; Civil Rights Act of 1866; Civil War; Confiscation Acts of 1861 and 1862; Draft riots; Fourteenth Amendment; North Star, The; Race riots of 1866; Reconstruction; Slavery; Slavery and the justice system; Thirteenth Amendment

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Employment African Americans have historically been discriminated against in both hiring and promotion. Race relations will improve as African Americans become more prominent in positions of high responsibility. African Americans continue to be confronted with the historical factors that produce racial discrimination in employment. Three salient factors contributing to racial discrimination in employment are trends in historical antecedents, educational level attainment, and employment and unemployment rates. Much excellent scholarly research provides data on these factors. In James Blackwell’s The Black Community: Diversity and Unity (1975) and Talmadge Anderson’s Introduction to African American Studies (1994), the authors provide historical and empirical data that more fully explain these areas. Historical Antecedents The first African American laborers were indentured servants who were brought to Jamestown, Virginia, in 1619. From the beginning, African Americans were not afforded a level playing field in employment. The seminal work by John Blassingame, The Slave Community (1972), offers a very good account of this period. Because the contemporary notion of rates of employment and unemployment is not relevant for slave labor, it is not possible to compare the work of African Americans and that of whites during the period of institutional slavery in America, which lasted from the mid-seventeenth century through 1865, more than two centuries. Following slavery, most African Americans were involved in farm labor at very low wages. The majority lived in the South and often worked as sharecroppers or day laborers. In the first quarter of the twentieth century, in an effort to escape the rigid de jure (legal) segregation that restricted their opportunities for employment in the South, African Americans began moving to the North in search of better jobs in record numbers. Finding themselves in the midst of the rapidly growing Industrial Revolution, African Americans began to acquire jobs that paid wages that far exceeded those they could receive as farmhands in the South.

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After World War II, more African Americans acquired skilled and professional jobs. Although in the 1990’s, the wages earned by African Americans were still below those of white workers, they had slowly but steadily increased relative to those of whites. According to the U.S. census, the African American median family income was 58 percent of that of whites in 1972. By 2001, that percentage had only increased to 66 percent. It is this trend that best reflects an important relationship between the races in the area of employment. Educational Attainment Levels The most pervasive trend in African American and white employment is that the former has always lagged behind the latter. In both percentage of employed and earnings, African Americans compare poorly with whites. Analysis of employment data from the 1960’s into the 1990’s shows that African American unemployment rates were double those of whites. As reported by Claudette E. Bennett in The Black Population in the United States, the unemployment rate for African American men in 1994 was 14 percent; the rate for white men was 6.7 percent. In that same year, African American women were unemployed at 12.1 percent while white women had an unemployment rate of 5.5 percent. Two factors substantially contribute to this disparity: educational differences and discrimination in hiring and promotions. Educational attainment is perhaps the highest social goal among Americans. It is generally believed that success in life, especially employment, is directly correlated to the level of education a person obtains. Since 1940, the disparity between African Americans and whites in educational attainment for grades K-12 has narrowed greatly. By 1998, the median years of education among the two groups was about equal. By that year, the percentages of whites and African Americans having completed high school was 88 percent. However, the percentage of whites with advanced degrees remained nearly three times that of African Americans. The educational inequality at the post-high-school level places African Americans at a disadvantage when attempting to qualify for professional jobs. Some of the proposed remedies include improving

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physical facilities in urban and rural schools, providing equivalent educational resources for all students, improving teacher quality and teacher training, enhancing school-community relations, and hiring and promoting substantially more African American faculty and administrators. Unemployment Rates Two factors stand out in any description of the African American experience in hiring and promotion in the United States. The unusually high rates of unemployment (official and hidden) and a modest presence in senior management positions point to major disparities between black and white people. Hidden unemployment refers to those persons discouraged in seeking employment and those who are involuntary part-time workers. The National Urban League estimates that the hidden unemployment

Racial prejudice and discrimination have historically consigned the most poorly paying menial jobs to members of racial minorities, particularly African Americans. (Library of Congress)

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rate for African Americans may be nearly double that of the official reported rate. Independent of gender, the unemployment rate for African Americans has continued to be more than double that of whites. This reality has held despite affirmative action, set-asides, and minority hiring policy programs. Similarly, the median per capita income for African American households and families has remained greatly below that of whites. Wealth owned by African Americans is less than 1 percent of that owned by whites. In the area of median worth of household, the U.S. Bureau of the Census reported in 1988 that African American worth was only 23 percent that of whites for families consisting of married couples. For female-headed families, African American families’ worth was only 3 percent that of whites. Three times as many African American female-headed households live in poverty as those headed by white women. Even within the corporate structure, African Americans have faired poorly. The federal Glass Ceiling Commission reported in 1995 that African Americans experienced disproportionately high resistance to advancement to high-level decision-making positions when compared with whites with similar education and training. Many of the experiences faced by African Americans in the corporate business environment are presented by George Davis and Glegg Watson in Black Life in Corporate America: Swimming in the Mainstream (1985). In a capitalist system in which employment and maximum fulfillment of human potential are vital to the accumulation of wealth, unfair employment practices have denied African Americans full opportunity to develop and maintain favorable conditions of wealth when compared with whites. With increasing national public policy that severely dampens affirmative efforts to level the playing field in hiring and promotion, the need for better education and employment seems less likely to be met. Joe R. Feagin and Melvin P. Sikes argue in their book Living with Racism: The Black Middle-Class Experience (1994) that African Americans have been adversely affected by the racist hiring and promotion practices in the area of employment. However, most critical has been a failure of the nation to capitalize on an oppor-

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tunity for a productive investment in African American human capital. William M. Harris, Sr. Further Reading James Blackwell’s The Black Community: Diversity and Unity (New York: Harper & Row, 1975), Talmadge Anderson’s Introduction to African American Studies (Dubuque, Iowa: Kendall/Hunt, 1994), and John Blassingame’s The Slave Community (New York: Oxford University Press, 1972) examine slavery and various historical factors that contribute to workplace discrimination against African Americans. Statistics on African Americans and employment are found in Claudette Bennett’s The Black Population in the United States (Upland, Pa.: Diane Publishing, 1995). Two books dealing with African Americans in the workplace are George Davis and Glegg Watson’s Black Life in Corporate America: Swimming in the Mainstream (New York: Doubleday, 1985) and Joe R. Feagin and Melvin P. Sikes’s Living with Racism: The Black Middle-Class Experience (Boston: Beacon Press, 1994). Social Goals and Educational Reform (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1988), edited by Charles V. Willie and Inabeth Miller, and A Common Destiny: Blacks and American Society (Washington, D.C.: National Academy Press, 1989), edited by Gerald David Jaynes and Robin M. Williams, Jr., suggest education reforms. See also Affirmative action; Agriculture; Economic trends; Education; Equal Employment Opportunity Act of 1972; Equal Employment Opportunity Commission; Fair Employment Practices Committee; Great Migration; Sharecropping

Equal Employment Opportunity Act of 1972 The Law: Federal legislation that prohibited government agencies and educational institutions from discriminating in hiring, firing, promotion, compensation, and admission to training programs

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Date: March 13, 1972 Landmark legislation helps redress historic discrimination against women and members of minorities in hiring and promotion. The Equal Employment Opportunity (EEO) Act of 1972 was an omnibus bill appended to Title VII of the Civil Rights Act, which had been enacted on July 2, 1964, to meet a need for federal legislation dealing with job discrimination on the basis of “race, color, religion, sex or national origin.” The 1964 act was charged to enforce the constitutional right to vote, to protect constitutional rights in public facilities and public education, to prevent discrimination in federally assisted programs, and to establish an Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC). Title VII did not, however, give comprehensive jurisdiction to the EEOC. A series of laws and executive orders has built up over the years to add to the momentum against discrimination in all areas of American life. With enactment of the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments, the Civil Rights Acts of 1866 and 1875, and a series of laws passed in the mid- and late 1880’s, the government and the president, in theory at least, gained sufficient authority to eradicate racial discrimination, including employment bias. No president, however, used his constitutional power in this regard. With the peaking of the Civil Rights movement in the early 1960’s, the pace of progress toward equal opportunity accelerated. President John F. Kennedy’s Executive Order 10925 established the Committee on Equal Employment Opportunity, the predecessor of the EEOC. Numerous other executive orders by succeeding presidents followed, each chipping away at discrimination in employment. Antidiscrimination Legislation The first modern federal legislation to deal specifically with employment discrimination, however, was the Equal Pay Act of 1963. As a result of this act, more than $37.5 million was subsequently found to be due to 91,661 employees, almost all of them women, for the years between 1963 and 1972. Then followed the momentous Civil Rights Act of 1964, which contained the provi-

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sion for equal employment opportunity that would be expanded with the 1972 law. The push for the Equal Employment Opportunity Act was a natural result of many forces in the early 1970’s: The economic disparity between white men, on one hand, and members of minorities and women, on the other, had become more apparent and disturbing. Women and members of minorities were generally last hired and first fired, with little chance for promotion. Yet, one-third of the U.S. workforce were women. Although most women worked in order to support themselves and their families, many people still considered their employment to be expendable and marginal. This was especially true for poor women, minority women, and female heads of household. Female college graduates earned only slightly more per year than the average white man with an eighth-grade education. In the 1960’s, femaleheaded households were largely black women with one thousand dollars less than their white counterparts in annual median income. The median annual income for white women in 1971 was slightly more than five thousand dollars, and for nonwhite women, four thousand dollars. African Americans in general suffered more from lower salary and lower job security and benefits because, in part, they either were discouraged or, in many cases, were not permitted to join labor or professional unions. In 1972, some 88 percent of unionists—about 15 million— were white, while only 2.1 million were from minority groups. Combatting Unemployment Another motivation to push for the EEO Act was unemployment. In 1971, the general unemployment rate was close to 6 percent as compared to 3.4 percent as recently as 1969. Rates of joblessness were highest among the veterans returning from Vietnam (12.4 percent), and in cities with high minority populations such as Jersey City (9 to 11.9 percent) and Detroit (6 to 8.9 percent). The U.S. Department of Labor reported in 1972 that onefifth of all wage and salary earners were unionized and males outnumbered females four to one. The unemployment issue had plagued government and business ever since Congress passed the Employment Act of 1946,

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which declared, among other things, that it was federal policy to promote “maximum employment.” On March 13, 1972, the EEO Act was passed by Congress, and on March 24, it was signed into law by President Richard M. Nixon. Primary responsibility for eliminating employment discrimination was entrusted to the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. Congress increased EEOC’s authority dramatically by giving it power to issue cease-and-desist orders, to receive and investigate charges, and to engage in mediation and conciliation regarding discriminatory practices. Jurisdiction of the EEOC was extended to cover all companies and unions of fifteen or more employees, private educational institutions, and state and local governments. The EEOC found broad patterns of discrimination. It resolved most of them and referred unresolved cases to the attorney general, who had authority to file federal lawsuits. Affirmative Action Affirmative action became one means to promote equal employment opportunity. It was a controversial measure from the start. Opponents of affirmative action viewed it as preferential treatment or “reverse discrimination,” often invoking the decision in Griggs v. Duke Power Company (1971), in which the Supreme Court noted that Congress did not intend to prefer the less qualified over the better qualified simply because of minority origin. Proponents of affirmative action believed that when properly implemented, the policy did not do away with competition but, rather, leveled the playing field to create equal opportunity for jobs in hiring, on-the-job treatment, and firing policies. Affirmative action, according to proponents, meant a conscious effort to root out all types of inequality of employment opportunity, such as unrealistic job requirements, non-job-related selection instruments and procedures, insufficient opportunity for upward mobility, and inadequate publicity about job openings. The U.S. Civil Service Commission provided technical assistance to state and local governments in developing affirmative action plans and provided training manuals for the purpose. The thrust of EEO guidelines, however, was that gender, racial, ethnic,

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national origin, or religious status alone should be avoided as an employment consideration. Women and members of minorities had taken the lead in getting the EEO proposal through Congress, thus making EEO a women’s and minority issue. The EEO Act dealt with areas where discrimination had been blatant, such as hiring and promotion by small businesses and by police and fire departments, as well as admission to local unions such as branches of the longshoremen in the Northeast and Southeast. Discrimination in some areas was so blatant that the federal appeals courts actually had to order hiring of members of minorities to rectify the situation. For example, after the passage of the EEO, Minneapolis hired its first minority-group fireman in twenty-five years. The EEO Act also dealt with various forms of discrimination against women, such as denying employment because there were no toilet facilities for women. The act required that women receive equal opportunities for sick leave, vacation, insurance, and pensions. It also became illegal to refuse to hire or to dismiss an unmarried mother as long as unwed fathers were holding jobs. Newspaper classified sections were no longer permitted to segregate help-wanted listings under male and female headings. Only a few jobs, such as that of actor, could be proved to have a bona fide occupational qualification on the basis of sex. Opposition Opposition forces focused on the confusion created by the passage of the EEO Act. Many of the existing labor laws protecting women and members of minorities seemed to become invalid in the context of the act. For example, the classic prohibition on work that would require a woman to lift more than a specified maximum weight could not stand. Qualification for employment would have to be based on ability to meet physical demands, regardless of gender. Banning women from certain jobs because of the possibility of pregnancy appeared to be impermissible. Leaves or special arrangements for the rearing of children would have to be available to the father, if the couple decided he was to take over domestic duties. In fact, “Men’s Lib” became a new trend in the 1970’s. Women’s campaigns for full equality prompted

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men to reassess their own situation. The result was that “liberation” was becoming an issue for both men and women. Men began moving into jobs once reserved for women, seeking alimony from wives, and demanding paternity leaves. The Supreme Court ruled that airlines could not limit flight attendant jobs to women, and most airlines began hiring some male stewards. AT&T had filled 25 percent of its clerical positions and 10 percent of its telephone operator positions with men by 1974. More men enrolled in nursing schools. On the other hand, by the time the EEO was enacted in 1972, 31 percent of black families were headed by women. One decade later, in 1982, this figure had grown to 45 percent as compared to 14 percent of families headed by white women in the same year. The EEO Act worked in tandem with or initiated investigations into other areas of discrimination, such as education. For example, by the late 1960’s, more than a decade after the Court struck down “separate but equal” laws, more than 75 percent of the school districts in the South remained segregated. This meant markedly disproportionate employment opportunities for African Americans. Impact Armed with its new authority, field investigators, and two hundred newly hired lawyers, the EEOC was able to respond effectively to complaints of discrimination. Within a few weeks of assuming its new, authoritative position, the EEOC had filed suits against many big companies. The actionable charges of sex discrimination surged from 2,003 cases in 1967 to 10,436 by June of 1972. Sex discrimination cases, in only three years from 1970 through 1972, increased by nearly 300 percent. By June 30, 1972, however, only 22 percent of cases involved sex discrimination and 58 percent racial and ethnic discrimination, with 11 percent involving national origin and 2.5 percent religious discrimination. In 1972, the EEOC forced employers to give raises to some twenty-nine thousand workers, mainly women, after finding violations of the law. The total underpayment of wages amounted to about fourteen million dollars.

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Much of the business sector objected to the EEOC’s efforts, contending that the new law would permit employees to file class-action suits without the employer’s being given fair notice of the identity of its accusers. Such criticism protested that as many as eight different laws gave employees an unfair advantage in pressing charges. Nevertheless, companies—including many large corporations that did work for the government—were forced to change their employment policies to comply, and the composition of the workforce began to change. The Equal Employment Opportunity Act, along with subsequent follow-on legislation, opened the door for many women, African Americans, and members of ethnic minorities to rise out of poverty and begin a movement toward middle- and upper-middle-class status that later would begin to change the power structure in the United States. Chogollah Maroufi Further Reading Blumrosen, Alfred. Modern Law: The Law Transmission System and Equal Employment Opportunity. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1993. Statistical and historical account of discrimination in employment; considerable discussion of the Equal Employment Opportunity Act of 1972 and its aftermath. Equal Employment Opportunity Act of 1972. Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1972. The actual text of the Equal Employment Opportunity Act, which became law on March 13, 1972. Libeau, Vera A. Minority and Female Membership in Referral Unions, 1974. Washington, D.C.: Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, 1977. Considers the special problems of women in trade unions and how they deal with job discrimination. National Committee on Pay Equity. Recommendation to EEOC. Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1983. Specific proposals made to the EEOC regarding the question of equal pay for equal work. Sedmak, Nancy J. Primer on Equal Employment Opportunity. 6th ed. Washington, D.C.: Bureau of National Affairs, 1994. Basic information regarding the identification of discrimination in

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employment and related legal remedies, explained in understandable language. Twomey, David. Equal Employment Opportunity Law. 2d ed. Cincinnati: South-Western Publishing Co., 1990. An illuminating discussion of legislation concerning discrimination in employment, with considerable attention to the Equal Employment Opportunity Act of 1972. See also Affirmative action; Civil Rights Act of 1964; Economic trends; Employment; Equal Employment Opportunity Commission; Fair Employment Practices Committee

Equal Employment Opportunity Commission Identification: Created by the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the EEOC monitors workplace compliance with civil rights legislation Date: Established 1964 This commission investigates complaints of discrimination based on race, ethnicity, sex, age, religion, national origin, or disability. Increasing numbers of cases being brought under the Civil Rights Acts of 1866 and 1871 and the Fourteenth Amendment in the 1950’s and 1960’s encouraged passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 to provide protection for workers against discrimination in the workplace. The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) was created to investigate complaints and to provide legal remedy to those victimized. Initially, the EEOC focused on cases of racial discrimination in the private sector. The landmark Supreme Court decision in Griggs v. Duke Power Company (1971) forced employers to show the job-relatedness of employment requirements. In 1972, the Civil Rights Act of 1964 was amended to include the public sector as well as the private. Affirmative action programs were created during the 1960’s and 1970’s, and the EEOC monitored their implementation and operation. EEOC regulatory efforts were very

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broadly focused and, through consolidation of complaints into class actions, the agency was able to address broad categories of discrimination. Judicial interpretation of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 expanded the focus of the commission to include sex discrimination and sexual harassment cases. EEOC guidelines addressed issues such as sex-based job classifications (“pink collar” occupations) that limited employment opportunities for women. The concept of comparable worth was addressed by the EEOC in the 1970’s. A lack of presidential support for equal employment opportunity during the 1980’s, however, slowed the process of reducing sex discrimination and addressing issues of sexual harassment. In 1979, the Regents of the University of California v. Bakke case challenged the validity of affirmative action programs, and the status of such programs was being hotly debated as the decade ended. Under Presidents Ronald Reagan and George Bush, the EEOC was much less active than it had been during the 1960’s and 1970’s. Under the direction of Clarence Thomas, who was appointed chairman by President Reagan, the commission was much less aggressive in investigating complaints and declined to pursue sex discrimination complaints based on the concept of comparable worth. The imposition of quotas to rectify cases of long-term discrimination and the consolidation of broad classes of discrimination were effectively ended. The handling of cases one by one severely limited the effectiveness of the EEOC. The Civil Rights Act of 1991 reaffirmed the principles of equal employment opportunity and affirmative action, although the use of quotas was discontinued. William L. Waugh, Jr. See also Affirmative action; Bakke case; Civil Rights Act of 1964; Civil Rights Act of 1991; Economic trends; Employment; Equal Employment Opportunity Act of 1972; Fair Employment Practices Committee; Griggs v. Duke Power Company

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Evans v. Abney The Case: U.S. Supreme Court ruling on restrictive covenants Date: January 29, 1970 The Supreme Court imposed a racially neutral principle to decide a question of the legitimacy of race-based restrictions on parkland donated to a municipality.

Justice Hugo L. Black wrote the 6-2 majority opinion upholding a decision of a Georgia court that a park built on land donated to the city of Macon explicitly for use as a whites-only park had to be closed and the property returned to the heirs of the person donating the land. Previous decisions made it clear that Macon was barred on equal protection grounds from operating the park on a racially restrictive basis. Because the benefactor had been explicit in his instructions, the Court decided the only proper course of action was to return the land to the heirs. Although African Americans were still denied access to the park, so were whites, thus preserving racial neutrality. Justices William O. Douglas and William J. Brennan, Jr., dissented, and Thurgood Marshall did not participate. Richard L. Wilson See also Segregation

Fair Employment Practices Committee Identification: Committee formed to investigate complaints of discrimination that arose from Executive Order 8802 Date: Spring, 1941 Although the committee was somewhat successful in its endeavors it was disbanded by 1946. The federal government did not establish another organization devoted to eliminating racial discrimination in employment practices until the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

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In the spring of 1941, as the United States prepared to enter World War II, African American leaders pressured the administration of Franklin D. Roosevelt to eliminate segregation in the armed forces and discriminatory hiring practices in the booming war industries. A. Philip Randolph, president of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, the largest black labor union, threatened a massive march on Washington, D.C., by a hundred thousand demonstrators under the banner Democracy Not Hypocrisy—Jobs Not Alms. Roosevelt, hoping to avoid an embarrassing racial protest that might divide the Democratic Party and his administration at a time when he needed unity for his war-preparedness program, moved to head off the March on Washington movement by meeting with Randolph and Walter White, president of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). On June 25, 1941, a week before the planned march, Roosevelt issued Executive Order 8802. It prohibited discrimination by employers, unions, and government agencies involved in defense work on the basis of race, creed, color, or national origin but made no mention of desegregating the armed forces. Roosevelt established the Fair Employment Practices Committee (FEPC) to investigate complaints and redress grievances stemming from the order. Randolph and White accepted the compromise arrangement and called off the march. Although African Americans hailed the FEPC as the greatest step forward in race relations since the Civil War, Roosevelt initially gave the agency little authority. Underfunded and understaffed, the FEPC at first could do little more than conduct investigations into complaints received and make recommendations, relying on the powers of publicity and persuasion to achieve change. In mid-1943, however, amid mounting concern that manpower shortages were hurting the war effort, Roosevelt beefed up the agency by giving it the authority to conduct hearings, make findings, issue directives to war industries, and make recommendations to the War Manpower Commission to curb discrimination. Impact The FEPC had a mixed record of accomplishment in eliminating racial discrimination in the war industries and government

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agencies. It resolved less than half of the eight thousand complaints received, and employers and unions often ignored its compliance orders with impunity. Although African American employment in the war industries increased from 3 percent in 1942 to 8 percent in 1945 and the federal government more than tripled its number of black employees, such changes had more to do with wartime labor shortages than FEPC actions. Nevertheless, the FEPC scored some significant successes. In 1944, federal troops broke up a strike by white Philadelphia transit workers and enforced an FEPC directive that African Americans be upgraded to positions as streetcar operators. At war’s end, despite the FEPC’s shortcomings, African American leaders and white liberals hoped to transform the committee into a permanent agency. In 1946, however, southern Democrats in the Senate filibustered a bill to extend the FEPC and killed the agency. Although several northern states passed their own Fair Employment Practices acts, the Senate again blocked bills to create a permanent FEPC in 1950 and 1952. Not until the Civil Rights Act of 1964 did the federal government establish another agency devoted to eliminating racial discrimination in employment practices. Richard V. Damms See also Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters; Civil Rights Act of 1964; Defense industry desegregation; Economic trends; Employment; Equal Employment Opportunity Act of 1972; Equal Employment Opportunity Commission; Military desegregation; National Association for the Advancement of Colored People

Fair Housing Act The Law: Federal legislation that prohibited discrimination in housing Date: April 11, 1968 This law helped to break racial enclaves in residential neighborhoods and promoted upward mobility for members of minorities.

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The Civil Rights Act of 1866 provided that all citizens should have the same rights “to inherit, purchase, lease, sell, hold, and convey real and personal property,” but the law was never enforced. Instead, such federal agencies as the Farmers Home Administration, the Federal Housing Administration, and the Veterans Administration financially supported segregated housing until 1962, when President John F. Kennedy issued Executive Order 11063 to stop the practice. California passed a general nondiscrimination law in 1959 and an explicit fair housing law in 1963. In 1964, voters enacted Proposition 14, an initiative to repeal the 1963 statute and the applicability of the 1959 law to housing. When a landlord in Santa Ana refused to rent to an African American in 1963, the latter sued, thus challenging Proposition 14. The California Supreme Court, which heard the case in 1966, ruled that Proposition 14 was contrary to the Fourteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, because it was not neutral on the matter of housing discrimination; instead, based on the context in which it was adopted, Proposition 14 served to legitimate and promote discrimination. On appeal, the U.S. Supreme Court let the California Supreme Court decision stand in Reitman v. Mulkey (1967). Johnson’s Efforts President Lyndon B. Johnson had hoped to include housing discrimination as a provision in the comprehensive Civil Rights Act of 1964, but he demurred when southern senators threatened to block the nomination of Robert Weaver as the first African American cabinet appointee. After 1964, southern members of Congress were adamantly opposed to any expansion of civil rights. Although Johnson urged passage of a federal law against housing discrimination in requests to Congress in 1966 and 1967, there was no mention of the idea during his state of the union address in 1968. Liberal members of Congress pressed the issue regardless, and southern senators responded by threatening a filibuster. This threat emboldened Senators Edward W. Brooke and Walter F. Mondale, a moderate Republican and a liberal Democrat, respectively, to cosponsor fair housing legislation, but they needed the support of conservative midwestern Repub-

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licans to break a filibuster. Illinois Republican senator Everett Dirksen arranged a compromise whereby housing discrimination would be declared illegal, but federal enforcement power would be minimal. In the wake of Reitman v. Mulkey, the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr., on April 4, 1968, and subsequent urban riots, Congress established fair housing as a national priority on April 10 by adopting Titles VIII and IX of the Civil Rights Act of 1968, also known as the Fair Housing Act or Open Housing Act. Signed by Johnson on the following day, the law originally prohibited discrimination in housing on the basis of race, color, religion, or national origin. In 1974, an amendment expanded the coverage to include sex (gender) discrimination; in 1988, the law was extended to protect persons with disabilities and families with children younger than eighteen years of age. Title VIII prohibits discrimination in the sale or rental of dwellings, in the financing of housing, in advertising, in the use of a multiple listing service, and in practices that “otherwise make unavailable or deny” housing, a phrase that some courts have interpreted to outlaw exclusionary zoning, mortgage redlining, and racial steering. Blockbusting, the practice of inducing a white homeowner to sell to a minority buyer in order to frighten others on the block to sell their houses at a loss, is also prohibited. It is not necessary to show intent in order to prove discrimination; policies, practices, and procedures that have the effect of excluding members of minorities, women, persons with disabilities, and children are illegal, unless otherwise deemed reasonable. Title VIII, as amended in 1988, covers persons who believe that they are adversely affected by a discriminatory policy, practice, or procedure, even before they incur damages. The law applies to about 80 percent of all housing in the United States. One exception to the statute is a single-family house sold or rented without the use of a broker and without discriminatory advertising, when the owner owns no more than three such houses and sells only one house in a two-year period. Neither does the statute apply to a four-unit dwelling if the owner lives in one of the units, the so-called Mrs.-Murphy’srooming-house exception. Dwellings owned by private clubs or

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religious organizations that rent to their own members on a noncommercial basis are also exempt. Enforcement Enforcement of the statute was left to the secretary of the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD). Complaints originally had to be filed within 180 days of the offending act, but in 1988, this period was amended to one year. HUD has estimated that there are about two million instances of housing discrimination each year, although formal complaints have averaged only forty thousand per year. The U.S. attorney general can bring a civil suit against a flagrant violator of the law. According to the law, HUD automatically refers complaints to local agencies that administer “substantially equivalent” fair housing laws. HUD can act if the local agencies fail to do so, but initially was expected only to use conference, conciliation, and persuasion to bring about voluntary compliance. The Fair Housing Amendments Act of 1988 authorized an administrative law tribunal to hear cases that cannot be settled by persuasion. The administrative law judges have the power to issue cease and desist orders to offending parties. HUD has used “testers” to show discrimination. For example, a team of black and white people might arrange to have an African American apply for a rental; if turned down, the black tester would contact a white tester to ascertain whether the landlord were willing to rent to a white instead. That testers have standing to sue was established by the U.S. Supreme Court in Havens v. Coleman (1982). Under the administrative law procedure, penalties are up to $10,000 for the first offense, $25,000 for the second offense, and $50,000 for each offense thereafter. Attorney fees and court costs can be recovered by the prevailing party. In 1988, civil penalties in a suit filed by the U.S. attorney general were established as up to $50,000 for the first offense and $100,000 for each offense thereafter. Title IX of the law prohibits intimidation or attempted injury of anyone filing a housing discrimination complaint. A vi-

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olator can be assessed a criminal penalty of $1,000 and/or sentenced to one year in jail. If a complainant is actually injured, the penalty can increase to $10,000 and/or ten years of imprisonment. If a complainant is killed, the penalty is life imprisonment. Impact The effect of the 1968 Fair Housing Act has been minimal. Without a larger supply of affordable housing, many African Americans in particular have nowhere to move in order to enjoy integrated housing. Federal subsidies for low-cost housing, under such legislation as the Housing and Urban Development Act of 1968 and the Housing and Community Development Act of 1974, have declined significantly since the 1980’s. Conscientious private developers are confronted with the text of a law that aims to provide integrated housing but proscribes achieving integration by establishing quotas to ensure a mixed racial composition among those who seek to buy or rent dwelling units. Michael Haas Further Reading Ingrid Gould Ellen’s Sharing America’s Neighborhoods: The Prospects for Stable Racial Integration (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2000) is an analysis of integration and housing. James A. Kushner’s Fair Housing: Discrimination in Real Estate, Community Development, and Revitalization (Colorado Springs, Colo.: McGraw-Hill, 1983) is a compendium of legislation and litigation. George R. Metcalf’s Fair Housing Comes of Age (New York: Greenwood Press, 1988) is a comprehensive evaluation of the precedent, purposes, and problems of enacting, implementing, and enforcing fair housing legislation. The Fair Housing Act After Twenty Years (New Haven, Conn.: Yale Law School, 1989), edited by Robert G. Schwemm, evaluates the political and social impediments to achieving nondiscrimination in housing. See also Civil Rights Act of 1964; Reitman v. Mulkey; Restrictive covenants; Segregation; Shelley v. Kraemer

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Fifteenth Amendment The Law: Amendment to the U.S. Constitution forbidding discrimination in voting rights on the basis of race, color, or previous condition of servitude. Section 2 gives enforcement power to Congress Date: 1870 The U.S. Supreme Court has used the Fifteenth Amendment to decide many cases involving discrimination in access to voting, especially after the passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1965. The law and the Court’s interpretive decisions ended racially discriminatory voting restrictions in the United States. The original U.S. Constitution tied the right of individuals to vote in federal elections to state election laws. A person who was eligible to vote in elections for the lower house of the state legislature was entitled to vote in federal elections. The result was that eligibility to vote was determined by state, not federal, law. If a national decision on voting rights was to be made, a constitutional amendment such as the Twenty-fourth, which ended poll taxes, was required. In 1868, after the Northern victory in the Civil War, the Fourteenth Amendment established citizenship and civil rights for the newly freed slaves. On February 3, 1870, the Fifteenth Amendment was adopted to prevent state governments from denying freed slaves the right to vote. Its language however, is much broader, because it prohibits denial of the right to vote “on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude.” Section 2 of the amendment gives Congress the power to enforce its terms by remedial legislation. Discriminatory Laws Immediately after the ratification of the amendment, Congress passed the Enforcement Act of 1870, which made it a crime for public officers and private persons to obstruct the right to vote. Enforcement of this law was spotty and ineffective, and most of its provisions were repealed in 1894. Meanwhile, beginning in 1890, most of the states of the former Confederacy passed laws

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The Fifteenth Amendment Section 1. 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. Section 2. The Congress shall have power to enforce this article by appropriate legislation.

that were specifically designed to keep African Americans from voting. Literacy tests were a major disqualifier because at that time more than two-thirds of adult African Americans were illiterate. At the same time, white illiterates were allowed to vote under grandfather clauses, property qualifications, and “good character” exceptions, from which African Americans were excluded. Racially discriminatory enforcement of voting qualifications became the principal means by which African Americans were barred from the polls. In the absence of a statute, the only remedy for these discriminatory practices was case-by-case litigation. The Supreme Court, in case after case, struck down the discriminatory state practices. Grandfather clauses were invalidated in Guinn v. United States (1915). The state-mandated all-white primary was outlawed in Nixon v. Herndon (1927); party-operated all-white primaries were forbidden by Smith v. Allwright (1944) and Terry v. Adams (1953). The Court held in United States v. Thomas (1959) that phony polling place challenges to African Americans seeking to vote—by the time the challenges had been resolved, the polls had closed— were improper under the Fifteenth Amendment. Racial gerrymandering was forbidden by Gomillion v. Lightfoot (1960). In that case, Alabama had redefined the shape of the city of Tuskegee so as to exclude all but four or five of its four hundred African American voters, thus denying this group the opportunity to influence city government. The Court also dealt with discriminatory administration of literacy tests in several cases, most important, Schnell v. Davis (1949), in which Justice William O. Douglas, writing for the Court, remarked that “the legislative setting and the great discretion it vested in the registrar made it clear

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that . . . the literacy requirement was merely a device to make racial discrimination easy.” Voting Rights Act of 1965 The mass disfranchisement of African Americans could not be reached efficiently or fully by means of individually brought cases. Although some of the discriminatory state practices were halted, every voting registration decision could be made on the basis of race if voting registrars wished to do so. Against this background, Congress passed the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Section 2 of the Fifteenth Amendment provided constitutional authority for this law, which was aimed at “ridding the country of racial discrimination in voting,” according to the statute’s preamble. The law forbade a number of discriminatory practices. Literacy tests were “suspended” for five years in areas where voting discrimination had been most flagrant. To deal with voting discrimination through outright intimidation and violence, the law provided for federal voting registrars and protection by federal marshals.

African Americans marching in New York City to celebrate the ratification of the Fifteenth Amendment in April, 1870. (Library of Congress)

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The first important cases arising under this law came to the Court in 1966. In South Carolina v. Katzenbach (1966), the Court held unanimously that the most important provisions of the Voting Rights Act were constitutional. Chief Justice Earl Warren wrote that “the record here showed that in most of the States covered, various tests and devices have been instituted with the purpose of disenfranchising Negroes, have been framed in such a way as to facilitate this aim, and have been administered in a discriminatory fashion for many years. Under these circumstances, the 15th Amendment has clearly been violated.” Because Congress’s power under the amendment is remedial, this finding of fact was necessary to invoke federal power. The broad construction of Congress’s power to deal with discrimination in voting in South Carolina v. Katzenbach established an important precedent to which the Court consistently adhered. Voting Rights Act of 1970 Congress renewed the Voting Rights Act in 1970 and extended the literacy test ban to the entire country. The extension reached New York State’s English-language literacy test, which had the practical effect of disfranchising many Puerto Rican voters. The English-language literacy test had been in place long before any substantial Puerto Rican migration to New York City had taken place. The extension was upheld by the Court in Oregon v. Mitchell (1970). Although the justices disagreed on some aspects of the new law, they were unanimous in upholding the constitutionality of the literacy test ban, even though there was no showing that New York had attempted to discriminate against Puerto Ricans. However, in Rome v. United States (1980), the Court became enmeshed in the question of the extent to which Congress may control state and local government under the Fifteenth Amendment. The question arose as to whether the remedial power reached only deliberate attempts by states and municipalities to deny Fifteenth Amendment voting rights or whether it was the effect of state practices on African American—and by extension, other minority group—voting that authorized federal action. The Court has not fully settled this extraordinarily complex constitutional question. Congress renewed and further extended the require-

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ments of the Voting Rights Act again in 1982, this time for a period of twenty-five years. The effect of the Court’s Fifteenth Amendment decisions coupled with the broader provisions of the Voting Rights Act has been immense. In 1961 only 1.2 million African Americans were registered to vote in the South—one-quarter of voting-age African Americans. By 1964 nearly 2 million were registered. In 1975 between 3.5 and 4 million African Americans were registered to vote in the South. By the end of the century, although electoral turnout among African Americans and other persons of color in the United States is still lower than that of whites, the gap has nearly been closed. Formal legal discriminatory barriers to voting no longer exist. Robert Jacobs Further Reading Conscience and the Constitution: History, Theory, and Law of the Reconstruction Amendments (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1993) by David A. J. Richards provides an analysis of the Fifteenth Amendment. Jack Greenberg’s Race Relations and American Law (New York: Columbia University Press, 1959) offers a good place to start for a comprehensive view of the constitutional rules before the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965. John Braeman’s Before the Civil Rights Revolution: The Old Court and Individual Rights (New York: Greenwood Press, 1988) discusses the developing jurisprudence of the Court in the area of civil rights. For insight into the inner workings of the Warren Court, Bernard Schwartz’s Inside the Warren Court (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1983), with Stephen Lesher, is based not only on the documentation but also on personal acquaintance. Compromised Compliance: Implementation of the 1965 Voting Rights Act (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1982) by Howard Ball, Dale Krane, and Thomas P. Lauth contains one of the first important discussions of the remedial versus effects morass in which the Court finds itself. Using cases, Daniel Hays Lowenstein’s Election Law (Durham, N.C.: Carolina Academic Press, 1995) analyzes how the Supreme Court has treated questions regarding electoral structures and

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processes. J. Morgan Kousser’s The Shaping of Southern Politics: Suffrage Restriction and the Establishment of the One-Party South, 1880-1910 (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1974) and Colorblind Injustice: Minority Voting Rights and the Undoing of the Second Reconstruction (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998) analyze the right to vote in the South, covering the Reconstruction era in the first volume and the post-World War II years in the second. Michael Dawson’s Behind the Mule: Race and Class in American Politics (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1994) examines voting rights in connection with race as does Abigail M. Thernstrom’s Whose Votes Count? Affirmative Action and Minority Voting Rights (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1987). See also Civil War; Fourteenth Amendment; Gerrymandering; Gomillion v. Lightfoot; Grandfather clauses; Guinn v. United States; Ku Klux Klan Acts; Lassiter v. Northampton County Board of Elections; Poll taxes; Reconstruction; Smith v. Allwright; Terry v. Adams; Thirteenth Amendment; Twenty-fourth Amendment; Understanding tests; Voting Rights Act of 1965; White primaries; Yarbrough, Ex parte

Film history Cinematic representations of African Americans have been the subject of debate and contest since the inception of the film industry. Struggles over stereotypes within film and over who controls the production of images of African Americans are firmly linked to broad cultural understandings and conceptions of race. The social and political stakes of film for African Americans were dramatically expressed early on, in the reception of D. W. Griffith’s 1915 film Birth of a Nation. As the first full-length feature film, Birth of a Nation helped inaugurate the studio system, and Griffith’s work as director supplied some of the basic elements of cinematic grammar. The film represented African Americans in purely stereotypical roles (as happy and loyal slaves, mammies,

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bucks, and brutes) while glorifying the Ku Klux Klan. Because the film was released while lynching was at its peak, the material it treated raised some concern, and the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) protested the film. As Ed Guerrero notes in Framing Blackness (1993), screenings of the film were often preceded by people dressed as members of the Klan riding through towns, and there was a march of twentyfive thousand Klansmen through Atlanta, Georgia, on opening night. Although the NAACP was not able to prevent the film from being shown, it did succeed in bringing enough political and economic pressure to make Hollywood executives think twice before producing a film that celebrated organizations like the Klan. Although Birth of a Nation may have presented an unusually virulent form of racism, stereotypical cinematic representations of African Americans would predominate in mainstream films for decades to come. However, these films never existed without contest or debate. Some African Americans believed that the best way to counter stereotypical representations was to protest in the courtrooms and streets; others decided to produce their own images. In the late 1920’s and 1930’s, a series of “race films” that were produced, written, and directed by African Americans attempted to present more realistic images of African Americans. Oscar Micheaux was the most famous of these filmmakers, releasing thirty-four films during a thirty-year period. Micheaux and the other independent black filmmakers who were his contemporaries had very limited resources, and it was not always clear that their representations were any less stereotypical than those of their mainstream counterparts. Nevertheless, they did manage to address black themes and to provide exposure for a large number of black actors while explicitly addressing a black audience. Civil Rights, Black Power and Blaxploitation Although this early independent black film industry started to decline in the face of increased competition from Hollywood studios and the economic toll of the Great Depression, some of its concerns were eventually addressed by mainstream cinema.

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From the end of World War II through the 1960’s, the Civil Rights and Black Power movements increasingly targeted Hollywood and helped create an environment in which some of the earlier depictions of African Americans were increasingly untenable. Stereotypes such as “mammies” and “bucks” never disappeared from Hollywood films, but they were eventually supplemented with more nuanced images of African Americans. Although mainstream films in the years immediately after Birth of a Nation tended to support the ideals of segregation, Hollywood films in the 1950’s and 1960’s had an integrationist ethic, which was marked most clearly by the growing stardom of African American Sidney Poitier in such films as Edge of the City (1957) and The Defiant Ones (1958). At the height of the Black Power movement, African American audiences expressed dissatisfaction with integrationist narratives that failed to address the contemporary realities of racism. This, coupled with black political power and the severe financial

In the film To Kill a Mockingbird (1962), based on Harper Lee’s novel, a southern lawyer (Gregory Peck, front left) defends a poor African American (Brock Peters, front right) falsely accused of rape. Its depiction of the justice system is considered so authentic that it is used in the training of lawyers. (Museum of Modern Art, Film Stills Archive)

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problems that were facing the Hollywood studios, led to a new wave of black-centered films that were released in the late 1960’s and early 1970’s and were labeled “blaxploitation” films because they were cheaply made and generally relied upon the same kinds of sexuality and violence that Hollywood used in its “exploitation” films. Some of the most famous blaxploitation films, including Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song (1971), Shaft (1972), and Superfly (1972), featured supermasculine black heroes who often had to fight against an oppressive social system. Occasionally, these heroes were women, including Tamara Dobson and Pam Grier in films such as Cleopatra Jones (1973) and Coffy (1973), who were just as macho as their male counterparts, Fred Williamson and Jim Brown. Although the depictions of strong African American heroes who were able to confront the problems surrounding them appealed to many African Americans, the films were criticized and protested for their tendency to reproduce stereotypical images of African Americans as prostitutes, pimps, and violent drug dealers. By the mid-1970’s, the genre had died out, as Hollywood studios discovered that they could court African American audiences without relying on black-centered films. Backlash and Beyond In the late 1970’s and the 1980’s, a conservative backlash against African American protests and gains (in the cinema as well as in the broader society) produced a series of films that openly relied upon racial stereotypes. However, films in which African Americans are presented solely as stereotypical or peripheral figures (such as the Rocky series, 1976-1990, or Caddyshack, 1980) were eventually joined by a series of new black independent films made by people such as Robert Townsend and Spike Lee. Townsend’s Hollywood Shuffle (1987) was an explicit critique of Hollywood’s representations of African Americans. It follows the career of a young and talented black actor who finds that there is plenty of work available in Hollywood, but only in stereotypical roles, as pimps, muggers, and so on. The most powerful African American filmmaker to emerge in the 1980’s was Spike Lee. Lee’s first commercial film, She’s Gotta

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Have It (1986), which was criticized for its depiction of black sexuality and its apparent acceptance of a black woman’s rape, nevertheless presented African Americans as fully realized human beings in a black-centered world. However, it was Lee’s 1989 film Do the Right Thing that established him as one of the most important and influential directors of the decade. The film, which follows events that lead to the death of a black man at the hands of white police officers, had tremendous box-office success although it was also the subject of immense controversy. It is widely credited with enabling the success of a variety of 1990’s black filmmakers such as Matty Rich, the Hughes Brothers, and John Singleton. The 1990’s saw a proliferation of black-centered mainstream and independent films. Some of the most interesting of these films (such as Cheryl Dunye’s The Watermelon Woman, 1997, and John Singleton’s Rosewood, 1997) were intended, in part, to question or correct Hollywood’s past treatment of African Americans. Others, such as Kasi Lemmon’s Eve’s Bayou (1997), depict African American social worlds without any apology for the omission of white characters. Of course, African American characters were also present in a wide variety of films in which they were not always central to the narratives, and black stereotypes resurfaced and were reconfigured in seemingly endless varieties. Just Cause (1995) and A Time to Kill (1996) in particular are remarkable for the ways in which they critique, reconfigure, and redeploy the figure of the black brute/rapist. The tension between and within films in the 1990’s serves as a condensed history of the always contested cinematic representations of African Americans. Jonathan Markovitz Further Reading Donald Bogle’s Bright Boulevards, Bold Dreams: The Story of Black Hollywood (New York: One World Ballantine Books, 2005) provides a fascinating examination of African Americans in the film industry. Bogle’s Primetime Blues: African Americans on Network Television (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2001) is a notable analysis of the role of African Americans on television. Bogle’s Toms, Coons, Mulattoes, Mammies, and Bucks (New York:

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Continuum, 1992) provides the most thorough investigation of African American stereotypes in film. Ed Guerrero’s Framing Blackness (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1993) is an excellent analysis of the ways in which blacks have been defined by film and have struggled to define themselves in that medium. Robert Lang’s The Birth of a Nation (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1994) and Fred Silva’s edited collection Focus on “The Birth of the Nation” (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1971) provide extended discussions of the importance and legacy of Birth of a Nation. Lisa M. Anderson’s Mammies No More examines changing cultural representations of black women. See also Cowboys; Harlem Renaissance; Ku Klux Klan; Literature; Lynching; Music; Roots; Stereotypes

Fourteenth Amendment The Law: Amendment to the U.S. Constitution that provides legal protections for individuals against state violations of civil rights Date: Ratified in July, 1868 The Supreme Court used the due process and equal protection clauses of this amendment in order to expand both the number and breadth of rights protecting individuals. More than any other amendment, the Fourteenth provided the basis for the range of rights that Americans came to take for granted during the twentieth century. The Fourteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, ratified by Congress in 1868, was part of the plan for Reconstruction following the Civil War (1861-1865) and was formulated by the Republican majority in the Thirty-ninth Congress. Before Congress met in December, 1865, President Andrew Johnson had authorized the restoration of white self-government in the former Confederate states, and the congressmen and senators from those states waited in Washington to be seated in Congress. The abolition of slavery had destroyed the old compromise under which five slaves counted as three free persons in apportioning representa-

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tion in the House and the electoral college, and the Republicans wanted to make sure that the South did not add to its numbers in the House and thus profit from rebellion. Between December, 1865, and May, 1866, the Republicans attempted to hammer out a program that would accomplish their purposes in the South, unite members of their party in Congress, and appeal to northern voters. Given the diversity of opinion within the party, this undertaking proved to be difficult. Radical Republicans wanted African American suffrage, permanent political proscription, and confiscation of the property of exConfederates. Some maintained they were authorized in these actions by the Thirteenth Amendment, which, they believed, gave Congress the power to abolish the “vestiges of slavery.” Moderate Republicans, on the other hand, feared political repercussions from African American suffrage, as such a requirement

The Fourteenth Amendment Section 1. All persons born or naturalized in the United States and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside. No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State 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. Section 2. Representatives shall be apportioned among the several States according to their respective numbers, counting the whole number of persons in each State, excluding Indians not taxed. But when the right to vote at any election for the choice of electors for President and Vice President of the United States, Representatives in Congress, the Executive and Judicial officers of a State, or the members of the Legislature thereof, is denied to any of the male inhabitants of such State, being twenty-one years of age, and citizens of the United States, or in any way abridged, except for participation in rebellion, or other crime, the basis of representation therein shall be reduced in the proportion which the number of such male citizens shall bear to the whole number of male citizens twenty-one years of age in such State.

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would result in beginning the Reconstruction process over again. Many moderates also believed that an additional amendment to the Constitution was needed to provide precise authority for Congress to enact civil rights legislation. From deliberations of the joint committee and debate on the floor of the House came the Fourteenth Amendment. Many Republicans believed that the proposal was in the nature of a peace treaty, although this view was not explicitly stated. If the South accepted the amendment, the southern states were to be readmitted and their senators and representatives seated in Congress; in other words, Reconstruction would end. Republicans presented a united front during the final vote as a matter of party policy. Because the amendment was an obvious compromise between radicals and moderates, it was too strong for some and too weak for others. Section 3. No person shall be a Senator or Representative in Congress, or elector of President and Vice President, or hold any office, civil or military, under the United States, or under any State, who, having previously taken an oath, as a member of Congress, or as an officer of the United States, or as a member of any State legislature, or as an executive or judicial officer of any State, to support the Constitution of the United States, shall have engaged in insurrection or rebellion against the same, or given aid or comfort to the enemies thereof. But Congress may by a vote of two-thirds of each House, remove such disability. Section 4. The validity of the public debt of the United States, authorized by law, including debts incurred for payment of pensions and bounties for services in suppressing insurrection or rebellion, shall not be questioned. But neither the United States nor any State shall assume or pay any debt or obligation incurred in aid of insurrection or rebellion against the United States, or any claim for the loss or emancipation of any slave; but all such debts, obligations and claims shall be held illegal and void. Section 5. The Congress shall have power to enforce, by appropriate legislation, the provisions of this article.

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The Amendment The Fourteenth Amendment became the most important addition to the Constitution since the Bill of Rights had been adopted in 1791. It contains five sections. Section 1, the first constitutional definition of citizenship, states that all persons born or naturalized in the United States are citizens of the United States and of the state in which they reside. It includes limits on the power of states, by providing that no state may abridge the privileges and immunities of citizens, deprive any person of life, liberty, or property without due process of law, or deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of law. This section was intended to guarantee African Americans the rights of citizenship, although the amendment’s framers did not define exactly which rights were included. Nor did they define “state action” to specify whether the term meant only official acts of state government or the actions of individuals functioning privately with state approval. The courts later interpreted the due process clause to extend the rights of the accused listed in the Bill of Rights, which had applied only to the federal government, to the states. They expanded the notion of equal protection to include other categories, such as sex and disability, as well as race. They also interpreted the word “person” to include corporations as legal persons; under this interpretation, corporations found protection from much state regulation. Section 2 gives a new formula of representation in place of the old three-fifths compromise of the Constitution, under which five slaves were counted as equal to three free persons in determining a state’s representation in the House of Representatives and the electoral college. All persons in a state were to be counted for representation, but if a state should disfranchise any of its adult male citizens, except for participation in rebellion or any other crime, the basis of its representation would be reduced proportionately. While not guaranteeing suffrage to African Americans, this provision threatened the South with a loss of representation should black males be denied the vote. Section 3 declares that no person who has ever taken an oath to support the Constitution (which included all who had been in the

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military service or held state or national office before 1860) and has then participated in the rebellion can be a senator or representative or hold any civil or military office, national or state. This disability could be removed only by a two-thirds vote of both houses of Congress. This section took away the pardoning power of the president, which congressional Republicans believed Andrew Johnson used too generously. Section 4 validates the debt of the United States, voids all debts incurred to support rebellion, and invalidates all claims for compensation for emancipated slaves. Section 5 gives Congress authority to pass legislation to enforce the provisions of the Fourteenth Amendment. The correspondence and speeches of those who framed the Fourteenth Amendment do not support any theories of economic conspiracy or ulterior motives. The framers desired to protect the former slaves and boost Republicanism in the South by barring old Confederates from returning to Congress and the electoral college with increased voting strength. They hoped to do this without threatening the federal system or unduly upsetting the relationship between the central government and the states. At the same time, Republicans wanted to unify their party and project a popular issue for the approaching electoral contest against Andrew Johnson. William J. Cooper, Jr. Updated by Mary Welek Atwell Further Reading Michael J. Perry’s We the People: The Fourteenth Amendment and the Supreme Court (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999) is an important contribution to the literature on this subject. Conscience and the Constitution: History, Theory, and Law of the Reconstruction Amendments (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1993) by David A. J. Richards provides an analysis of the Fourteenth Amendment. Michael Les Benedict’s A Compromise of Principle: Congressional Republicans and Reconstruction, 1863-1869 (New York: W. W. Norton, 1974) emphasizes the Republicans’ concern that the Fourteenth Amendment maintain the role of the states in the federal system. LaWanda Cox and John H. Cox’s Politics, Princi-

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ple, and Prejudice: Dilemma of Reconstruction America, 1865-1866 (New York: Free Press, 1963) posits that civil rights, rather than merely partisan politics, was the central issue during Reconstruction. Harold M. Hyman and William Wiecek’s Equal Justice Under Law: Constitutional Development, 1835-1875 (New York: Harper & Row, 1982) includes a thorough discussion of the Fourteenth Amendment as a logical and necessary extension of the Thirteenth Amendment. Donald E. Lively’s The Constitution and Race (New York: Praeger, 1992) focuses on the association of attitudes toward race and constitutional interpretation. See also Black codes; Brown v. Board of Education; Civil Rights Act of 1866; Civil Rights Act of 1964; Civil Rights Acts of 1866-1875; Civil Rights Cases; Civil War; Disfranchisement laws in Mississippi; Emancipation Proclamation; Fifteenth Amendment; Reconstruction; Thirteenth Amendment

Free African Society Identification: Movement founded for a dual purpose—to serve the black community’s religious needs as a nondenominational congregation and to function as a benevolent mutual aid organization Date: Founded in 1787 Place: Pennsylvania The Free African Society was the first major secular institution with a mission to aid African Americans. Both the origins of the Free African Society and the long-term repercussions of its founding form an essential part of the religious history of African Americans. The original organization itself was of short duration: About seven years after it was organized in 1787, it disappeared as a formal body. In its immediate wake, however, closely related institutions emerged that tried to take over its proclaimed mission. Generally speaking, prior to the 1790’s people of African slave origins who managed to obtain their individual freedom had

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only one option if they wished to practice Christianity: association, as subordinate parishioners, in an existing white-dominated church. Several churches in the American colonies before independence, including the Quakers and Methodists, had tried to identify their religious cause with that of the black victims of slavery. Richard Allen Richard Allen, born in 1760 as a slave whose family belonged to Pennsylvania’s then attorney general, Benjamin Chew, was destined to become one of the earliest religious leaders of the black segment of the American Methodist Church. As a youth, Allen gained extensive experience with Methodist teachings after his family was separated on the auction block in Dover, Delaware. Allen was encouraged by his second owner, Master Stokeley, to espouse the religious teachings of the itinerant American Methodist preacher Freeborn Garrettson. Allen’s conversion to Methodism was rewarded when Stokeley freed him at age twenty to follow the calling of religion. His freedom came just as the Revolutionary War ended. For six years, Allen worked under the influence of Methodist evangelist Benjamin Abbott and the Reverend (later Bishop) Richard Whatcoat, with whom he traveled on an extensive preaching circuit. Allen’s writings refer to Whatcoat as his “father in Israel.” With Whatcoat’s encouragement, Allen accepted an invitation from the Methodist elder in Philadelphia to return to his birthplace to become a preacher. At that time, Philadelphia’s religious environment seemed to be dominated by the Episcopal Church. This church had been active since 1758 in extending its ministry to African Americans. It was St. George’s Methodist Episcopal Church, however, that, in the 1780’s, had drawn the largest number of former slaves to its rolls. Once the circumstances of the second-class status of African Americans became clear to Allen, he decided that his leadership mission should be specifically dedicated to the needs of his people. Within a short time, he joined another African American, Absalom Jones, in founding what was originally intended to be more of a secular movement than a formal denominational movement: the Free African Society.

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Absalom Jones Absalom Jones was older than Allen and had a different set of life experiences. Born a slave in Delaware in 1746, Jones served for more than twenty years in his master’s store in Philadelphia. He earned enough money to purchase his wife’s freedom, to build his own home, and finally, in 1784, to purchase his own freedom. He continued to work for his former master for wages and bought and managed two houses for additional income. His success earned for him great respect among other free blacks and opened the way for him to serve as lay leader representing the African American membership of St. George’s Methodist Episcopal Church. Traditional accounts of Jones’s role in the founding of the Free African Society assert that, when Jones refused to comply with the announcement of St. George’s sexton that African American parishioners should give up their usual seats among the white congregation and move to the upper gallery, he was supported by Richard Allen, in particular. The two then agreed that the only way African Americans could worship in an environment that responded to their social, as well as religious, needs would be to found an all-black congregation. Some sources suggest that Jones’s reaction to the reseating order was the crowning blow, and that Allen previously had tried to organize several fellow black parishioners, including Doras Giddings, William White, and Jones, to support his idea of a separate congregation, only to have the idea rejected by the church elders. Organization Goals Whatever the specific stimulus for Allen’s and Jones’s actions in 1787, they announced publicly that their newly declared movement would not only serve the black community’s religious needs as a nondenominational congregation but also function as a benevolent mutual aid organization. The latter goal involved plans to collect funds (through membership fees) to assist the sick, orphans, and widows in the African American community. Other secular social assistance aims included enforcement of a code of temperance, propriety, and fidelity in marriage. It is significant that a number of the early members of the Free African Society

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came to it from the rolls of other Protestant churches, not only St. George’s Methodist Episcopal congregation. The dual nature of the organization’s goals soon led to divisions in the politics of leadership. Apparently, it was Allen who wanted to use the breakaway from St. George’s as a first step in founding a specifically black Methodist church. Others wished to emphasize the Free African Society’s nondenominational character and pursue mainly social and moral aid services. Within two years, therefore, Allen resigned his membership, going on to found, in July, 1794, the Bethel African Methodist Episcopal Church. Although this move clearly marked the beginnings of a specifically African American church with a defined denominational status, Allen’s efforts for many years continued to be directed at social and economic self-help projects for African Americans, irrespective of their formal religious orientation. By 1804, Allen was involved in founding a group whose name reflected its basic social reform goals: the Society of Free People of Color for Promoting the Instruction and School Education of Children of African Descent. Another of Allen’s efforts came in 1830, when Allen, then seventy years of age, involved his church in the Free Produce Society in Philadelphia. This group raised money to buy goods grown only by nonslave labor to redistribute to poor African Americans. It also tried to organize active boycotts against the marketing and purchase of goods produced by slaveowning farmers, thus providing an early model for the grassroots organizations aimed at social and political goals that would become familiar to African Americans in the mid-twentieth century. The Free African Society passed through several short but key stages both before and after Richard Allen’s decision to remove himself from active membership. One focal point was the group’s early association with the prominent medical doctor and philanthropist Benjamin Rush. Rush helped the Free African Society to draft a document involving articles of faith that were meant to be general enough to include the essential religious principles of any Christian church. When the organization adopted these tenets, in 1791, its status as a religious congregation generally was recognized by members and outsiders alike. More and more, its close relationship with the Episcopal Church (first demonstrated by its

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“friendly adoption” by the Reverend Joseph Pilmore and the white membership of St. Paul’s Church in Philadelphia) determined its future denominational status. After 1795, the Free African Society per se had been superseded by a new church built by a committee sparked by Absalom Jones: the African Methodist Episcopal Church. This fact did not, however, prevent those who had been associated with the Free African Society’s origins from integrating its strong social and moral reform program with the religious principles that marked the emergence of the first all-black Christian congregations in the United States by the end of the 1790’s. Byron D. Cannon Further Reading Carol V. R. George’s Segregated Sabbaths: Richard Allen and the Emergence of Independent Black Churches, 1760-1840 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1973) includes discussion of the African American churches’ eventual abolitionist activities. Mwalimi I. Mwadilitu’s Richard Allen: The First Exemplar of African American Education (New York: ECA Associates, 1985) focuses on the career of Richard Allen, including his functions after 1816 as the first bishop of the African Methodist Episcopal Church. See also African Methodist Episcopal Church; American AntiSlavery Society; Baptist Church; Black church; Black codes; Freemasons in Boston; Liberator, The; National Council of Colored People; Pennsylvania Society for the Abolition of Slavery

Free blacks Definition: African Americans who were not slaves during the era of slavery Free African Americans of the antebellum era wielded profound influence upon black society in the post-slavery United States. In 1860, an estimated 500,000 free people of African ancestry resided in the United States; of these, approximately half lived

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in the slaveholding South. Most of these free blacks were former slaves who had purchased their freedom or were freed in their masters’ wills, but a significant minority were freeborn. Their experiences varied by region; those in the northern states, although limited in economic opportunity, enjoyed greater political and social freedom than their counterparts in the South, where demand for black labor was greater but free blacks were regarded with suspicion. The majority of free blacks lived in extreme poverty; however, a small but significant number achieved modest prosperity and a few attained substantial wealth, in some instances purchasing plantations and becoming slaveholders. Free African Americans of the antebellum period exerted profound influence upon black society in the post-slavery United States. The abolitionist rhetoric of former slaves such as Frederick Douglass and Samuel Ringgold Ward influenced later generations of black activists, and the activities of free southern blacks set precedents for race relations and relations among African Americans after emancipation. The political and legal restrictions placed on free blacks by fearful southern whites in the antebellum period provided a blueprint for racial oppression in the South during the era of segregation. Michael H. Burchett Further Reading Robinson, Cedric J. Black Movements in America. New York: Routledge, 1997. See also Civil War; Emancipation Proclamation; Freedmen’s Bureau; Freemasons in Boston; Slavery

Freedmen’s Bureau Identification: Agency established by the federal government to assist newly freed African Americans in making the transition from slavery to freedom Date: Established on March 3, 1865

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The bureau’s ability to perform its varied tasks was impeded by several factors. Consequently, African Americans developed extensive selfhelp networks to address their needs. In 1865, Congress created the Freedmen’s Bureau, a temporary agency within the War Department. The bureau, also known as the United States Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen, and Abandoned Lands, was administered by General Oliver Otis Howard from 1865 until it was dismantled by Congress in 1872. The primary objective of the Freedmen’s Bureau was to help newly freed African Americans to function as free men, women, and children. In order to achieve this goal, the bureau was expected to assume responsibility for all matters related to the newly freed slaves in the southern states. The bureau’s mission was an enormous undertaking because of limited resources, political conflicts over Reconstruction policies, and a hostile environment. The work of the bureau was performed by General Howard and a network of assistant commissioners in various states, largely in the South. The Freedmen’s Bureau attempted to address many of the needs of the newly freed African Americans, including labor relations, education, landownership, medical care, food distribution, family reunification, legal protection, and legal services within the African American community. Labor and Education In the area of labor relations, the Freedmen’s Bureau dealt with issues such as transporting and relocating refugees and the newly freed persons for employment, contract and wage disputes, and harsh legislation enacted by some states. Concerning the last issue, many southern states had passed laws, called black codes, that required adult freed men and women to have lawful employment or a business. Otherwise, they would be fined and jailed for vagrancy, and sheriffs would hire them out to anyone who would pay their fine. Given the scarcity of jobs, this policy resulted in former slave owners maintaining rigid control over newly freed African Americans. Another discriminatory law gave the former owners of orphaned African Americans the right to

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Northern antipathy toward the Freedmen’s Bureau can be seen in this 1866 political advertisement that a Pennsylvania candidate for Congress published to attack his opponent’s support of the bureau. (Library of Congress)

hire them as apprentices rather than placing them with their relatives. Again, this law resulted in the continuation of free labor for many southerners. The Freedmen’s Bureau has been criticized for the failure of its agents to negotiate labor contracts in the interest of the newly freed. The bureau was frequently accused of protecting the rights of the southern planters instead. Obtaining an education was extremely important to the newly freed African Americans. They knew that learning to read and write would enable them to enter into contracts and establish businesses, and would aid them in legal matters. The Freedmen’s Bureau provided some support, by providing teachers, schools, and books and by coordinating volunteers. The bureau also made a contribution to the founding of African American colleges and universities. Southern opposition to educating African Americans was a result of the southerners’ fear that education would make African Americans too independent and unwilling to work

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under the terms established by their former owners. Therefore, southerners instituted control over the educational administration and classrooms and the entire system. Southern planters used various methods to exert control: frequent changes in administrative personnel, the use of racial stereotypes regarding the intellectual inferiority of African Americans, and educational policy decision making based on paternalism and self-interest. Consequently, educational opportunities were significantly restricted for African American youth. Property and Other Rights The newly freed African Americans were eager to acquire property. They demonstrated their interest in owning their own land as individuals and formed associations to purchase large tracts of land. Their sense of family and community was the basis for their strong desire to own land. The Freedmen’s Bureau was initially authorized to distribute land that had been confiscated from southern plantation owners during the Civil War. The Freedmen’s Bureau also attempted to provide for the social welfare of the freed persons. The agency was noted for rationing food to refugees and former slaves; it assisted families in reuniting with members who had been sold or separated in other ways during slavery. Protecting the rights of the former slaves was a major task of the Freedmen’s Bureau. Republicans believed that African Americans should have the same rights as whites. However, many southern states enacted black codes that severely restricted the civil rights of the freed men, women, and children. These laws, exacting social and economic control over African Americans, represented a new form of slavery. When state legislation prohibited African Americans’ equal rights, the bureau attempted to invoke the 1866 Civil Rights Act, which offered African Americans the same legal protections and rights as whites to testify in courts, to own property, to enforce legal contracts, and to sue. The bureau found it extremely difficult to enforce the Civil Rights Act and to prosecute state officials who enforced laws that were discriminatory against African Americans. A shortage of agents and a reluctance among bureau commissioners to challenge local officials contributed to the agency’s lim-

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ited success in enforcing the Civil Rights Act. Finally, the Freedmen’s Bureau also established tribunals to address minor legal disputes of African Americans within their own communities. In many instances, freed slaves were able to resolve their own problems. When they could not, they presented their legal concerns to bureau agents. The task assigned to the Freedmen’s Bureau was monumental. The responsibilities of the bureau significantly exceeded the resources and authority granted to it by Congress. The bureau’s ability to perform its varied tasks also was impeded by personnel shortages. President Andrew Johnson’s Reconstruction policies represented another major challenge to the bureau, as they were not always supportive of the bureau’s mandate and objectives. Myriad problems associated with the bureau meant that the newly freed men, women, and children were not able to receive the goods and services necessary to gain economic independence. Consequently, they developed extensive self-help networks to address their needs. K. Sue Jewell Further Reading The Freedmen’s Bureau and Reconstruction: Reconsiderations (New York: Fordham University Press, 1999) edited by Paul A. Cimbala and Randall M. Miller is a valuable resource. Barry A. Crouch’s The Freedmen’s Bureau and Black Texans (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1982) discusses the Reconstruction era and the Freedmen’s Bureau in the state of Texas. The Freedmen’s Bureau and Black Freedom (New York: Garland, 1994), edited by Donald G. Nieman, explores the various problems that affected the bureau. Edward Magdol’s A Right to the Land: Essays on the Freedmen’s Community (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1977) emphasizes the efforts that African Americans pursued to acquire land and their relentless quest for self-determination. See also Black codes; Civil Rights Act of 1866; Civil Rights Acts of 1866-1875; Disfranchisement laws in Mississippi; Education; Fourteenth Amendment; Ku Klux Klan; Race riots of 1866; Reconstruction; Thirteenth Amendment

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Freedom Rides The Event: Civil Rights movement campaign against segregation in public transportation Date: May 4-August, 1961 Place: Southern states The Freedom Rides, which highlighted the continued segregation of interstate bus terminals throughout the South, were met with violence that caused much of the nation to support the riders’ cause. James Farmer, the national director of the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), an interracial, northern-based civil rights group, conceived the idea for the Freedom Rides. Modeled on the Journey for Reconciliation, the 1947 project sponsored by the pacifist Fellowship of Reconciliation, Farmer’s plan called for an integrated group of civil rights activists to travel by bus from Washington, D.C., to New Orleans, Louisiana, as a means of testing southern compliance with Boynton v. Virginia (1960), the Supreme Court’s ruling prohibiting segregation in interstate transportation facilities. Farmer believed that by demonstrating that bus terminal waiting rooms, bathrooms, and restaurants remained segregated throughout the South, the rides would highlight southern defiance of federal law and prompt federal authorities to remedy the situation. The First Bus Ride On May 4, 1961, seven African Americans and six whites divided into two interracial groups and boarded a Greyhound and a Trailways bus in Washington to begin their southern journey. The trip through Virginia and North Carolina was uneventful, but in South Carolina, white toughs attacked the riders in Rock Hill, and police arrested two of them in Winnsboro. Though they made it safely to Atlanta, Georgia, the situation worsened dramatically when they entered Alabama. Near Anniston, angry whites firebombed the Greyhound bus and beat the riders as they escaped from the burning vehicle. In Birmingham, a mob attacked those on the Trailways bus when it arrived at the terminal. Several riders were seriously injured, so CORE called off the rest of the journey.

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Other civil rights activists, however, rushed to resume the rides, lest segregationists think that violence could derail the movement. Led by the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), the leading student civil rights organization, an integrated group of student activists converged on Birmingham. From Birmingham, the new riders traveled to Montgomery, where they were brutally assaulted by a mob awaiting them at the bus station. In the ensuing melee, John Lewis of SNCC suffered a concussion, James Zwerg, a white student from the University of Wisconsin, sustained spinal cord injuries, and John Seigenthaler, the administrative assistant to Attorney General Robert Kennedy, was attacked as he tried to protect several riders. Federal Government Response The violence in Montgomery forced the John F. Kennedy administration to act. As the riders prepared to travel into Mississippi on May 24, the administration arranged for National Guardsmen to ensure their safe passage into the state. Determined to prevent another violent disturbance, Robert Kennedy consented to the riders’ arrest for violating segregationist ordinances in Jackson in exchange for assurances that state and local authorities would stop a white mob from forming at the terminal. As a result, the only white people on hand when the bus pulled into the station were National Guardsmen, state troopers, and city police officers. Local officials promptly arrested the twenty-seven Freedom Riders as they entered the whites-only areas of the terminal. Rather than paying fines, the activists chose to stay in jail to dramatize their opposition to segregationist laws. Subsequently, Farmer called for others to travel to Jackson to be arrested for trying to exercise their constitutional rights, and by the end of the summer of 1961, more than three hundred people, most of them African American southern students, had heeded his call and had spent time in Mississippi’s jails and prisons. The threat of renewed violence and continued arrests in Jackson inspired the Kennedy administration to pressure the Interstate Commerce Commission to issue explicit rules outlawing segregation in interstate travel facilities, a step the commission took in September, 1961. For civil rights activists, the Freedom

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Rides revealed that the federal government was an unreliable partner in the struggle for African American equality. Although the rides made it clear that violent confrontations and national media attention would impel the federal government to act, they also showed that in the absence of such conditions, federal authorities would permit others to trample on African American rights. The Freedom Rides helped deepen the participants’ commitment to the Civil Rights movement and to each other. Beatings, arrests, and jailings strengthened the bonds between the activists and encouraged them to see themselves as the vanguard of the militant, direct-action wing of the movement. Gregg L. Michel Further Reading Original CORE Freedom Rider James Peck published an account of his experience in Freedom Ride (1962), and Taylor Branch offered a lengthy discussion of the Freedom Rides in his magisterial Parting the Waters: America in the King Years, 1954-1963 (1988). The Freedom Rides are addressed in Walking with the Wind: A Memoir of the Movement (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1998) by John Lewis, with Michael D’Orso. See also Birmingham March; Civil Rights movement; Congress of Racial Equality; Journey of Reconciliation; Selma-Montgomery march; Sit-ins; Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee

Freedom Summer The Event: Summer-long voter-registration campaign in a state in which African Americans had long been excluded from voting Date: 1964 Place: Mississippi With the help of one thousand volunteers from all over the country, African Americans in Mississippi endured many jailings and some deaths to break barriers and alert the nation to the reality of a social system maintained by terror.

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In the early 1960’s, Mississippi’s elected officials were determined to preserve white supremacy and segregation. Several African Americans who attempted to register to vote or to challenge the status quo were murdered. In 1961, leaders of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) formed the Council of Federated Organizations (COFO) to further the cause of civil rights in Mississippi. Challenges The COFO planned to register voters; set up freedom schools to teach African Americans job skills, African American history, and the rights of citizens under the U.S. Constitution; form community centers from which to launch challenges to segregation under the Civil Rights Act of 1964, and canvass for the newly established Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party (MFDP), which had no standing under Mississippi law. Organizing began in especially difficult towns such as McComb in southwest Mississippi. Stokely Carmichael moved SNCC headquarters to Greenwood in the Delta area of the state, where local businessperson Amzie Moore and SNCC organizer Robert P. Moses began planning for a massive effort for the summer of 1964, which would follow the violent resistance to the enrollment of James H. Meredith at the University of Mississippi in 1962 and the murder of NAACP leader Medgar Evers in 1963. Recruitment of volunteers of all races took place, mostly on college campuses, and civil rights workers began arriving long before the summer began. Many underwent orientation in Oxford, Ohio. Three COFO volunteers—James Chaney, Michael Schwerner, and Andrew Goodman—were murdered in Neshoba County by a mob led by Sheriff Lawrence Ramey and including Ku Klux Klan members on June 21, 1964. However, the violence did not stop the COFO from carrying out its plans for community centers, freedom schools, and voter registration drives. White volunteers got most of the publicity, and their presence protected local African Americans to some extent, but permanent change was

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achieved by local people working in their own behalf, using the volunteers as a catalyst. Volunteers averaged slightly more than one arrest each by local authorities during the summer, and many were beaten or otherwise harassed. Publicity for the project had a major national impact. A reluctant Federal Bureau of Investigation and other agencies were forced into action to protect volunteers and local people, a role that has been much exaggerated in films such as Mississippi Burning (1988). The MFDP challenge to regular Mississippi Democrats at the 1964 Democratic National Convention provided a showcase for local leaders such as Fannie Lou Hamer of Ruleville. Some disputes arose between Moses, who believed that local people should lead the movement for their own freedom, and Allard Lowenstein, who believed the COFO should form a close alliance with the liberal wing of the Democratic Party; however, COFO remained united until the summer project was over. Many volunteers stayed on to work with SNCC and other organizations that flourished in the wake of the pioneering 1964 effort. Achievements Freedom Summer was successful in opening the eyes of the American public to the inequities suffered by black residents of Mississippi; however, the public’s concern with the state of affairs in Mississippi itself did not last much longer than the summer. The white volunteers gained considerable experience during the summer, and many of them continued to be active in other organizations. Within the COFO, the divisions between black and white activists and local and outsiders grew, causing it to disband in 1965. The MFDP gained considerable publicity when it challenged the seating of the “regular” Democratic Party delegates from Mississippi at the party’s national convention in 1964. Although the MFDP was unable to replace the official delegates with any of its own, it had a lasting effect: The 1968 Democratic National Convention featured a racially integrated Mississippi delegation. Although Freedom Summer ended without any marked improvements in the state, by the 1990’s, Mississippi had more elected African American officials than any other state, social re-

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lations among the races did not differ greatly from those in other parts of the country, and educational opportunities for African Americans had greatly improved. However, tensions between whites and African Americans remained and the poverty of the majority of the African American community was largely unabated. J. Quinn Brisben Further Reading Mississippi Freedom Summer (Belmont, Calif.: Thomson/Wadsworth, 2004), edited by John F. McClymer, is an insightful examination of the drive. John Dittmer’s Local People: The Struggle for Civil Rights in Mississippi (1994) is an analytical history of Freedom Summer. Doug McAdam’s Freedom Summer (1988) gives the background and subsequent activities of the volunteers. See also Civil Rights Act of 1964; Civil rights worker murders; Congress of Racial Equality; Ku Klux Klan; Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party; National Association for the Advancement of Colored People; Southern Christian Leadership Conference; Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee; University of Mississippi desegregation

Freemasons in Boston Identification: First African American Masonic lodge Date: Founded on September 29, 1784 Place: Boston, Massachusetts Since its founding, Boston’s Prince Hall Masonic Lodge has provided moral teachings, aid to members in need, and even business contacts for the millions of African American men who passed through the ranks of the order. Prince Hall, a former slave living in Boston, perceived the many benefits of belonging to the fraternal group called the Freemasons. In the thirteen colonies, many of the most prominent and respected citizens were Masons, including George Washington,

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Samuel Adams, and Benjamin Franklin. As in the mother country, Masonic lodges in America stressed religion, morality, and charity to members in need and to all humankind. Many members developed business ties with their Masonic associates. Prince Hall was born a slave in 1748. When he was twenty-one years of age, he was granted his freedom by his master. Hall entered into the trade of leather work. He pursued this calling for the rest of his life, although later, his Masonic leadership and his catering business occupied increasing amounts of his time. Tradition holds that Prince Hall fought against the British in the American Revolution. This is almost certainly true, but since several Massachusetts soldiers were named Prince Hall, details of this Prince Hall’s army career are not clear. In 1775, just before the outbreak of the American Revolution, a white Mason named John Batt initiated Hall and fourteen other free black Bostonians into the Masonic order. The fifteen initiates soon organized the first black Masonic lodge in America, calling it African Lodge. They continued to meet, but under the strict hierarchy of Masonry, a local group such as the African Lodge must be subordinate to a Grand Lodge, making regular reports as well as payments into the Grand Lodge charity fund. The American Masonic hierarchy was still evolving, and Prince Hall and his associates knew that many white Masons in the new country did not approve of black lodges or even black members. Chartering the Lodge On March 2, 1784, and again on June 30 of that year, Prince Hall wrote to the Grand Lodge of England asking for an official charter. This charter would confer added legitimacy on African Lodge and would give it a powerful ally. Difficulties in getting letters and money between Boston and England slowed the process of obtaining the charter, but Hall’s group finally got the requisite fees to the Grand Lodge of England, and in 1787 African Lodge received its charter. The document, dated September 29, 1784, gave African Lodge the right to initiate new members and the duty of reporting regularly to the English Grand Lodge. Some of the activities of African Lodge related directly to race. In 1787, three free African Americans from Boston were kid-

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napped by men who took them to the Caribbean island of St. Bartholomew and prepared to sell them into bondage. One of the three was a member of African Lodge. Prince Hall and the other black Masons of Boston agitated actively for release of their brother Mason, and for law enforcement officers to protect free African Americans from kidnapping. The petition circulated by Prince Hall helped goad the Massachusetts legislature into passing a law to punish slave traders and kidnappers. The three men won their release when the one who was a member of African Lodge gave a Masonic sign that was recognized by a white Mason living on St. Bartholomew, and the white Mason had the captors arrested and the three men returned to Boston. Activities of the Lodge Although the records of the early meetings of African Lodge are scarce, copies of two addresses by Prince Hall and one sermon by the lodge chaplain have survived. All three documents exhibit a strong degree of racial pride and solidarity. In his first charge to the African Lodge, delivered and published in 1792, Hall chided white Masons who claimed that the existence of black Masons would somehow make the order too common. He pointed out that that had not been the feeling during the recent Revolutionary War, when white and black soldiers had fought shoulder to shoulder. Prince Hall concluded by saying that any man who rebuked an African American man because of his skin color actually was rebuking God, who had made all people in his own image. Hall’s second charge to his lodge was delivered and published in 1797. In this address, the Masonic leader painted a baleful picture of the barbaric cruelties of slavery, and used the Bible to prove that the institution was not part of God’s will. On a more optimistic note, Hall lectured his brother Masons about the nation of Haiti, where six years earlier the slaves had revolted and thrown off the yoke of French government and of slavery itself. Hall saw the revolt in Haiti as a first step by African Americans in ending the hated system of slavery. John Marrant, a free African American minister living in Boston, became the chaplain of African Lodge. One of Marrant’s sermons to the lodge was delivered and printed in 1789. As was the

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case with Hall’s addresses, Marrant’s sermon stressed what later writers would call black pride. Marrant said that African Americans should not be ashamed that their race was enslaved, since nearly every great people had been enslaved at one time or another, and such enslavement had often been the prelude to a great flourishing of that people. Marrant dipped into the Bible and into ancient history to prove that Africa had produced at least as many great civilizations as had any other region on earth. On at least one occasion, members of the African Lodge put their pride in Africa into action. In 1787, Prince Hall circulated a petition asking the Massachusetts government to aid in returning men and women of color to Africa. Seventy-three persons signed the petition, including most members of African Lodge. The petition is one of the earliest documents in American history associated with a back-to-Africa movement. On most other occasions, however, members of African Lodge preferred to work to improve their standing within the United States. Spreading the Word As the free black population in the northern states continued to grow, African Lodge responded to requests to bring Masonry to African Americans in other areas. A number of residents of Providence, Rhode Island, were initiated into African Lodge and later began their own lodge with the blessings of Prince Hall and his followers. African Lodge also helped found new lodges in Philadelphia and New York. Meanwhile, all the Masonic lodges in the United States that were chartered by one of the British Grand Lodges began to have less contact with the Grand Lodges across the ocean. African Lodge was no exception. In 1827, African Lodge declared its independence of the English Grand Lodge and of any other Grand Lodge. It became the Grand Lodge for all chapters of African American Masons it founded in the United States. The so-called Prince Hall Masonry continued to flourish long after the death of Hall in 1807. In 1995, the order boasted three hundred thousand members in the United States. For more than two hundred years, Prince Hall Masonry has provided moral teachings, aid to members in need, and even business contacts for the millions of African American men who passed through the

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ranks of the order. For most of that time, white Masons attacked the Prince Hall Masons for claimed irregularities in the latter’s organizational history, including the history of the Prince Hall Masons’ charters. Yet any alleged irregularities were also part of the history of early white lodges in the United States. While attacks on Prince Hall Masonry are less common today than they were previously, Masonry remains a highly segregated area of American life. Stephen Cresswell Further Reading Crawford, George W. Prince Hall and His Followers. 1914. Reprint. New York: AMS Press, 1971. The classic defense of Prince Hall Masons to the charges of irregularity made by white Masonic groups. Dillard, Thomas Henry. “History of Calumet Lodge #25 Free and Accepted Masons, Prince Hall Affiliation.” Journal of the AfroAmerican Historical and Genealogical Society 10, no. 1 (1989): 2228. A rare glimpse into the history of a single lodge of Prince Hall Masons. Grimshaw, William H. Official History of Freemasonry Among the Colored People in North America. 1903. Reprint. Freeport, N.Y.: Books for Libraries Press, 1971. For many years, this book was considered the basic history of Prince Hall Masonry. Readers should be aware that it contains a vast number of unsubstantiated statements and should be used with care. Muraskin, William A. Middle-Class Blacks in a White Society: Prince Hall Freemasonry in America. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1975. Sociological and historical examination of Prince Hall Masonry as a foundation of the African American middle class. Wesley, Charles H. Prince Hall: Life and Legacy. 2d ed. Washington, D.C.: United Supreme Council, 1983. A careful history that does a good job of separating earlier myths about the origins of Prince Hall Masonry from documented fact. See also Abolition; Black codes; Free African Society; Free blacks; Pennsylvania Society for the Abolition of Slavery

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Fugitive Slave Law of 1793 The Law: Federal law requiring the return of slaves fleeing across state lines Date: Signed into law on February 12, 1793 The Fugitive Slave Law aggravated sectional conflict between free and slave states. In colonial America, the return of fugitives within and between jurisdictions was a common practice. These fugitives were usually felons escaping from jails; persons charged with crimes; apprentices and indentured servants fleeing from their employers; or black, white, or Native American slaves running away from their masters. Their rendition between jurisdictions depended on comity among colonial authorities. The articles of the New England Confederation of 1643 included a provision for the return of fugitive slaves and servants. Like all subsequent American legislation on the topic, it did not provide for a trial by jury. Rising Sectional Conflict In the late eighteenth century, with the growth of antislavery sentiment in the North and the settlement of territory west of the Appalachian Mountains, a uniform method for the return of fugitive slaves became necessary. Article VI of the Northwest Ordinance of 1787 excluding chattel slavery provided that persons escaping into the territory from whom labor or service was lawfully claimed in any one of the original states might be returned to the person claiming their labor or service. The provision did not distinguish between slaves and indentured servants. The United States Constitution of the same year incorporated the provision, without limiting the claimants to residents of the original states of the union. One of several concessions intended to win support from the slaveholding states, Article IV, Section 2, states that “no person held to service or labor in one state, under the laws thereof, escaping into another, shall, in consequence of any law or regulation therein, be discharged from such service or labor, but shall be delivered up on claim of the party to whom such service or labor may be due.”

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Thanks to fugitive slave laws, African Americans could never feel safe, even after reaching northern states. (Library of Congress)

In 1793, Congress decided to set federal rules for the rendition of alleged fugitives. This action was prompted by Pennsylvania’s attempt to recover from Virginia several men accused of having kidnapped John Davis, a free black man. Unable to receive satisfaction, the governor of Pennsylvania brought the matter to the attention of President George Washington, who referred it to the Congress. A committee of the House of Representatives, led by Theodore Sedgwick of Massachusetts, reported a rendition bill on November 15, 1791, but no action was taken. A special Senate committee, consisting of George Cabot of Massachusetts, Samuel Johnston of North Carolina, and George Read of Delaware, submitted a bill on December 20, 1792, establishing a ministerial procedure for the extradition of judicial fugitives. It also provided a system for the recovery of fugitives from labor or service. A claimant had to present a written deposition from one or more credible persons to a local magistrate who would order officers of the court to seize the fugitive and turn him or her over to the claimant. The bill set penalties for harboring a fugitive, neglecting a duty, or obstructing an arrest. After debate, the bill was recommitted with instructions to amend, and John Taylor of Virginia and Roger Sherman of Connecticut were added to the committee.

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A Revised Bill January 3, 1793, a revised bill was reported to the Senate by Johnston, allowing the claimant or his agent to seize a fugitive and bring that person to a federal court or a local magistrate. Oral testimony or an affidavit certified by a magistrate of the master’s state sufficed to establish a claim. To guard against the kidnapping of free African Americans, residents of the territory or state in which they were seized, the new bill included a proviso assuring them their rights under the laws of that territory or state. This meant they were entitled to a judicial inquiry or a jury trial to determine their status. They were also to be presumed free, until proven otherwise, and allowed to testify on their own behalf. After two debates, during which the proviso was dropped, the bill passed the Senate on January 18. It was entitled “An act respecting fugitives from justice and persons escaping from their masters.” The House passed it with little discussion, February 5, by a vote of forty-eight to seven. Seven days later, President Washington signed the bill into law. The first two sections of the act, known popularly as the Fugitive Slave Act of 1793, dealt with the interstate rendition of fugitives from justice. The third section provided that when a person held to labor escaped into any state or territory of the United States, the master or a designated agent could seize that individual and bring him or her before a judge of the federal courts in the state or before any magistrate of a county, city, or incorporated town. Title was proven by the testimony of the master or the affidavit of a magistrate in the state from which the escapee came, certifying that the person had escaped. The judge or magistrate then had to provide a certificate entitling the petitioner to remove the fugitives. The act applied to fugitive apprentices or indentured servants as well as to slaves, a provision important at that time to representatives of the northern states. The act did not admit a trial by jury, and it contained no provisions for the alleged fugitives to offer evidence on their own behalf, although they were not prevented from doing so if the presiding judge or magistrate agreed. Section 4 provided criminal penalties, a fine of five hundred dollars, in addition to any civil action the owner might have un-

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der state law, for obstructing the capture and for rescuing, harboring, aiding, or hiding fugitives. Although many attempts were made to amend the act, it remained the law of the land until the abolition of slavery, its constitutionality repeatedly upheld by the Supreme Court. It was amended and supplemented, not replaced, by the Second Fugitive Slave Law of 1850, part of the Compromise of 1850. Impact of the Law The statute contributed significantly to acerbating the growth of sectional conflict within the United States. Efforts to enforce its provisions encountered immediate resistance in northern states, isolated and scattered at first but increasingly wellorganized and vigorous (for example, the Underground Railroad), as slavery prospered in the Old South and spread to western lands. Many northern states passed personal liberty laws (Indiana in 1824, Connecticut in 1828, New York and Vermont in 1840). Designed to prevent the kidnapping of free African Americans, these laws provided for trial by jury to determine their true status. The effectiveness of the statute was further diminished by the Supreme Court’s decision in Prigg v. Commonwealth of Pennsylvania (1842) that state authorities could not be forced by the national government to act in fugitive slave cases. Subsequently, Massachusetts (1843), Vermont (1843), Pennsylvania (1847), and Rhode Island (1848) forbade their officials to help enforce the law and refused the use of their jails for fugitive slaves. Because the Fugitive Slave Act of 1793 provided no federal means of apprehending fugitive slaves, owners had to rely on the often ineffectual and costly services of slave catchers. With the outbreak of the Civil War, the law ceased to apply to the Confederate States. It was considered valid in the loyal border states until it was repealed June 28, 1864. Charles H. O’Brien Further Reading Campbell, Stanley. The Slave Catchers: Enforcement of the Fugitive Slave Law, 1850-1860. Chapel Hill: University of North Caro-

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lina Press, 1970. Chapter 1 deals with attempts to enforce the Fugitive Slave Act of 1793. Finkelman, Paul. “The Kidnapping of John Davis and the Adoption of the Fugitive Slave Law of 1793.” The Journal of Southern History 56, no. 3 (August, 1990): 397-422. Discusses the incident that led the Congress to take up the issue of fugitive slaves; thoroughly examines the legislative progress of the law. ____________. Slavery in the Courtroom: An Annotated Bibliography of American Cases. Washington, D.C.: Library of Congress, 1985. Presents a detailed description of judicial decisions, as well as other documents pertaining to the enforcement of the Fugitive Slave Act of 1793. McDougall, Marion G. Fugitive Slaves, 1619-1865. 1891. Reprint. New York: Bergman, 1969. Appendix includes the text of the Fugitive Slave Act of 1793 and many other relevant legislative and judicial documents. Morris, Thomas D. Free Men All: The Personal Liberty Laws of the North, 1780-1861. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1974. A definitive account of the efforts of Northern states to secure individual liberty against the harsh implications of the Fugitive Slave Law of 1793. Wiecek, William M. Liberty Under Law: The Supreme Court in American Life. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1988. Discusses the Supreme Court’s interpretation of the Fugitive Slave Act of 1793 in Prigg v. Commonwealth of Pennsylvania (1842). ____________. The Sources of Antislavery Constitutionalism in America, 1760-1848. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1977. Detailed exposition of the fugitive slave provisions of the Northwest Ordinance and the United States Constitution, 1787. See also Black codes; Bleeding Kansas; Compromise of 1850; Fugitive Slave Law of 1850; Kansas-Nebraska Act; Missouri Compromise; Northwest Ordinance; Proslavery argument; Slave codes; Slavery and the justice system; Underground Railroad

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Fugitive Slave Law of 1850 The Law: Federal law designed to facilitate the return of slaves who fled to northern states from from the South Date: Signed into law on September 18, 1850 This law further exacerbated tensions between the North and the South and helped lead the nation into the Civil War. The U.S. Congress passed the Second Fugitive Slave Law in September, 1850, as part of the Compromise of 1850. This compromise, its supporters hoped, would provide a permanent settlement of the long-standing dispute between the North and the South over slavery. The dispute had reached crisis proportions in 1848, after the United States forcefully acquired from Mexico huge territories in the Southwest, which raised the issue of the status of slavery in those territories. Most of the provisions of the Compromise of 1850 dealt with that issue. Southern white spokespersons also insisted that the government do something to prevent slave escapes into the North and to make it easier for masters to reclaim fugitive slaves from there. Background Slave escapes had been common long before the United States became an independent country. It was the decision of the northern states following the Revolutionary War to abolish slavery within their bounds that created a sectional issue. As a result, in 1787, southern influence brought about the insertion in the U.S. Constitution of a clause providing that slaves escaping from one state to another were not to be freed but returned to their masters. This clause established the constitutional basis for fugitive slave laws. The first such law, passed by Congress in 1793, allowed masters, on their own, to apprehend escaped slaves in the free states. Although this law provided no legal protection for persons accused of being fugitive slaves, neither did it authorize state or federal assistance for masters attempting to reclaim slaves.

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Several events in the 1840’s prompted white southerners to intensify demands for a stronger fugitive slave law. First, the number of slave escapes increased as the slave labor system in the border slave states weakened. Second, a few black and white abolitionists became active in helping slaves escape. Third, northern states began passing “personal liberty laws” requiring jury trials to determine the status of African Americans accused of being fugitive slaves. Such trials provided protection to those falsely accused and also made it more difficult for masters to reclaim actual escapees. The Supreme Court addressed this last issue in the case of Prigg v. Commonwealth of Pennsylvania (1842). In Prigg, the Court ruled that a state could not interfere with the right of a master to recapture slaves. The Court also ruled, however, that, because the power to legislate on the fugitive slave issue was purely national, states were not required to assist in the enforcement of the First Fugitive Slave Law. This ruling allowed for a new series of personal liberty laws that denied masters the support they needed to apprehend alleged slaves. For many southern whites, who feared that slave escapes were a major threat to the existence of slavery in the border slave states, the fugitive slave law issue loomed as large as the issue of slavery in the territories in the late 1840’s. In response to these concerns, Senator James Mason of Virginia proposed the passage of a new and stronger fugitive slave law, on January 3, 1850. The Law Is Passed When Mason’s much-amended bill became law nine months later, it appeared to be all that southern whites demanded. It provided that United States marshals had to assist masters in arresting fugitive slaves and that the marshals could, in turn, summon northern citizens to help. It provided that United States circuit courts appoint numerous commissioners who were empowered to evaluate the truth of a master’s claim and authorize the return of fugitives to a master’s state. Accused fugitives were not permitted to testify before the commissioners. The commissioners would receive a fee of ten dollars if they accepted a master’s claim and only five dollars if they did not. Anyone who interfered with

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the apprehension of alleged fugitive slaves or who helped such persons escape was subject to a fine of up to one thousand dollars and imprisonment for up to six months. To many northerners, the new law seemed to be excessively harsh and corrupting. Even northerners who expressed no opposition to slavery in the South had little enthusiasm for assisting in the rendition of fugitive slaves. The denial to the accused of the right to testify, of the writ of habeas corpus, and of a jury trial appeared to be invitations for the unscrupulous to use the new law to facilitate kidnapping of free African American northerners. That commissioners were paid more to remand to the South persons accused of being fugitive slaves than to exonerate such persons seemed to be a bribe in behalf of the putative masters. The official explanation of the different fees—that to send the accused back to the South required more paperwork than to reject a master’s claim—seemed a disingenuous excuse to many northerners. Finally, because the law was retroactive, fugitive slaves who had lived safely in the North for many years were now subject to recapture. To abolitionists, who opposed the very existence of slavery and encouraged slaves to escape, and to antislavery politicians, who contended that the South was seeking to expand its slave system into the North, the new law was anathema. The law’s harshness and its apparent invasion of northern states’ rights led less committed northerners to oppose it as well. Even as the bill that became the Second Fugitive Slave Law made its way through Congress, antislavery senators Salmon P. Chase of Ohio and William H. Seward of New York attempted, without success, to defeat it or to include in it provisions for jury trials. Antislavery northerners denounced Senator Daniel Webster of Massachusetts for his March 7, 1850, endorsement of the bill. When it became law on September 18, there were protests throughout the North, although most northerners acquiesced in its enforcement. Enforcement In many instances, however, enforcement was very difficult. As soon as the law went into effect, African Americans escaping

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from the South went to Canada, beyond the reach of the law. Others who had lived in the North for years took refuge across the Canadian border in times of danger. New personal liberty laws in a number of northern states—several of which required jury trials—not only protected those falsely charged with being fugitive slaves but, by adding expenses, discouraged masters from pressing claims. Harriet Beecher Stowe’s best-selling novel, Uncle Tom’s Cabin, first published in serial form in 1851-1852, both reflected and encouraged northern antipathy to the Second Fugitive Slave Law. By portraying slavery as a brutal system and depicting fugitive slaves sympathetically, Stowe aroused an emotional northern reaction against the law. Most striking, black and white people physically resisted enforcement of the law throughout the 1850’s. Shortly after the law went into effect, former slave Harriet Tubman, with the help of black and white abolitionists, began her career of leading bands of slaves out of the South. Meanwhile, in Boston, Massachusetts; Christiana, Pennsylvania; Syracuse, New York; Wellington, Ohio; Milwaukee, Wisconsin; and elsewhere in the North, armed biracial mobs obstructed the enforcement of the act. While the law was peacefully enforced in large regions of the North, its most important effect was to widen the gulf between the North and South. Many northerners considered the law to be unconstitutional and an immoral southern aggression, in behalf of an oppressive institution, upon not only African Americans but also the rights and values of northern whites. White southerners, many of whom had predicted that the new Fugitive Slave Law would be ineffective, regarded northern resistance to it as another sign of antipathy toward the South and its institutions. What had been designed as part of a compromise to quiet sectional animosities, instead increased those animosities and helped lead the nation into civil war in 1861. Stanley Harrold Further Reading Brandt, Nat. The Town That Started the Civil War. Syracuse, N.Y.: Syracuse University Press, 1990. Analyzes events related to the Oberlin-Wellington fugitive slave rescue of 1859, one of the

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more famous instances of violent resistance to the Second Fugitive Slave Law. Campbell, Stanley W. The Slave Catchers: Enforcement of the Fugitive Slave Law, 1850-1860. New York: W. W. Norton, 1972. A discussion of the background, constitutionality, and Northern reaction to the Second Fugitive Slave Law and its enforcement. Hamilton, Holman. Prologue to Conflict: The Crisis and Compromise of 1850. New York: W. W. Norton, 1964. Places the Second Fugitive Slave Law in the context of a broader discussion of the Compromise of 1850. Potter, David M. The Impending Crisis, 1848-1861. Completed and edited by Don. E. Fehrenbacher. New York: Harper & Row, 1976. A thorough political history of the era during which the Second Fugitive Slave Law was passed and enforced. Slaughter, Thomas P. Bloody Dawn: The Christiana Riot and Racial Violence in the Antebellum North. New York: Oxford University Press, 1991. Places the Christiana riot, one example of violent resistance to the Second Fugitive Slave Law, in the broader context of white racism and African American poverty. See also Bleeding Kansas; Compromise of 1850; Fugitive Slave Law of 1793; Kansas-Nebraska Act; Missouri Compromise; Proslavery argument; Scott v. Sandford; Slave codes; Slavery and the justice system; Thirteenth Amendment; Underground Railroad

Fullilove v. Klutznick The Case: U.S. Supreme Court ruling on affirmative action Date: July 2, 1980 The Supreme Court held that setting aside a percentage of federal contracts for minority businesses was constitutional as long as it was intended to remedy demonstrated discrimination. After Congress passed the Local Public Works Capital Development and Investment Act in 1976, there was an outcry when minority business enterprises (MBEs) received only 1 percent of the contracts. Although members of minorities accounted for at least

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15 percent of the U.S. population, only 3 percent of businesses were MBEs, and they earned only 0.65 percent of gross receipts. Accordingly, in passing the Public Works Employment Act of 1977, Congress required 10 percent of local public works contracts to be “set aside” for MBEs—businesses with at least 50 percent ownership or 51 percent stockholding by African Americans, Spanish-speaking people, Asian Americans, American Indians, Eskimos, or Aleuts. Nonminority prime contractors were required, in subcontracting to MBEs, to provide guidance and technical assistance in making bids, to lower or waive bonding requirements, and to assist MBEs in obtaining working capital from financial institutions and government agencies. Shortly after Juanita Krebs, U.S. secretary of commerce, issued administrative guidelines for bidding under the new law, several potential project grantees (H. Earl Fullilove and trustees of the New York Building and Construction Industry Board of Urban Affairs Fund, two general contractor associations, and a firm engaged in heating, ventilation, and air conditioning work) filed suit against Krebs, the city and state of New York, the New York Board of Higher Education, and the Health and Hospitals Corporation for a temporary restraining order to block implementation of the law. After they lost the case in the district court (in December, 1977) and on appeal (in 1978), they took the case to the Supreme Court. When the case was decided, Philip Klutznick was U.S. secretary of commerce. Chief Justice Warren Burger wrote the majority opinion; three justices provided concurring majority opinions, and two wrote dissents. The Court answered the argument that government should act in a color-blind manner by noting that Congress had the power to spend money for the general welfare and thus to design a remedy for MBEs. The argument that nonminority businesses were deprived of equal access to contracts was rejected: a 10 percent setaside rate was considered light in view of the larger percentage of members of minorities. The Court responded to the argument that the definition of “minority” was underinclusive and should have added other groups by noting that such a definition was entirely up to Congress. The argument that the “minority” definition was overinclusive and might favor MBEs unqualified to do

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the technical work was refuted by a reference to the statutory provisions that only members of bona fide minorities were covered by the law and that a waiver from the set-aside could be issued if no MBE was able to do the work. The Supreme Court thus held that a numerical goal could be designed as a remedy for a statistically demonstrated inequality for members of minorities, with provisions tailored to removing specific, documented barriers to the success of minorities. Plans failing these tests have been consistently rejected by the Court, as in Richmond v. J. A. Croson Company (1989). See also Adarand Constructors v. Peña; Affirmative action; Civil Rights Act of 1964; United Steelworkers of America v. Weber

Gerrymandering Definition: Practice of drawing artificially contorted electoral district boundaries with the intent of favoring certain parties or groups The outcome of elections can be strongly influenced by the way electoral districts are drawn. Gerrymandering—which has historically been used to reduce African American voting power—can threaten the fairness and very legitimacy of representative democracy, and in most cases the Supreme Court ruled it to be unconstitutional. Put simply, gerrymandering is the drawing of electoral districts in order to favor a political party or other group. In practice, gerrymandering results in contorted district boundaries that include “desirable” demographic groups (whose members are likely to vote for a particular party) and exclude “undesirable” groups. Although the practice violates the intended purpose of redistricting, a case has been made for maintaining “cohesive” voting blocs within electoral districts. Redistricting The voters of the United States are divided into 435 congressional districts, with each district electing one legislator to the

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U.S. House of Representatives. Each state is allocated a certain number of districts, based on its relative population. Every ten years the 435 congressional seats are “reapportioned” among the states, according to new population figures from the latest census. The states (primarily the state legislatures) then draw new district boundaries, both to permit an increase or decrease in their allotment of congressional seats and to ensure that all districts include approximately the same number of voters. The term “gerrymander” was coined in 1812, when the Massachusetts legislature created a contorted state senate district to favor the Democratic-Republican Party. The district was said to resemble a salamander, and was dubbed a “Gerrymander” in reference to Governor Elbridge Gerry, who approved it. Constitutional Issues Various manifestations of gerrymandering have been found to be unconstitutional on several grounds. One concerns the equality of constituency size. A disproportionately large population might be consolidated into one district, thus diluting the political strength of its voters relative to the voters in smaller districts.

Early nineteenth century political cartoon satirizing Massachusetts governor Elbridge Gerry’s plan to create a voting district shaped like a salamander. (Library of Congress)

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(This would occasionally be done to dilute the voting strength of African Americans.) In Wesberry v. Sanders (1964), the U.S. Supreme Court decreed that congressional representation must be based on the one person, one vote principle. That is, districts must be created “as nearly as practicable” with roughly equal numbers of voters. Creating districts with numerically comparable populations does not, in itself, ensure that the one person, one vote principle is observed. With knowledge of certain voting indicators (such as party affiliation), a district can be drawn that is heavily weighted toward a particular political party or group. The Court found this type of gerrymander to be unconstitutional in Gomillion v. Lightfoot (1960). In that case, the Alabama legislature had altered a local election district to virtually exclude African Americans. The Court found that the district violated the equal protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. Although many gerrymandered districts were based on attempts to disfranchise minority voters, many others simply favored political parties, without regard to ethnic considerations. In Davis v. Bandemer (1986), the Supreme Court found that this type of gerrymandering also violated the equal protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. Majority-Minority Districts Although the Supreme Court consistently stood against redistricting schemes seeking to disenfranchise minorities during the 1970’s and 1980’s, it ruled that race-based districts might occasionally be necessary to ensure that the voting strength of minority groups is effective. In fact, federal courts ordered some states to create districts so they would majorities of ethnic or racial minority groups in order to uphold the 1965 Voting Rights Act. In essence, it was assumed that the voting strength of racial and ethnic groups could be increased by concentrating their votes in individual districts. The approach was bolstered by a 1982 amendment to the act that upheld the right of African Americans and Hispanics “to elect representatives of their choice.” In the 1990’s the notion of majority-minority districts came under increasing, powerful attack. Although many leaders of mi-

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nority groups continued to defend such districts as a necessary mechanism for increasing minority representation, the public mood and the Court turned against the idea. A watershed was reached with the Shaw v. Reno decision in 1993. In that case, two predominantly African American districts in North Carolina were at issue. Under pressure from the U.S. Department of Justice, the North Carolina legislature created the districts in an attempt to ensure that the state, whose population was 22 percent African American, would elect its first black congressional representatives in more than a century. Both of the districts in question did indeed elect African Americans in 1992. However, five white voters in one of the districts sued the state, claiming that they had been effectively “disenfranchised” by the reapportionment plan. The case reached the Supreme Court, whose 5-4 majority opinion instructed the lower courts to reconsider the constitutionality of the district, which had a “bizarre” shape and bore an “uncomfortable resemblance to political apartheid.” Although the lower courts again upheld the district (while making findings to satisfy the Court), Shaw opened the door for more legal challenges to majority-minority districts. In 1995 the Court more definitively rejected the notion of racebased districts in Miller v. Johnson. In this case, the Court rejected redistricting plans in which “race was the predominant factor motivating the legislature’s decision to place a significant number of voters within or without a particular district.” Miller forced the Georgia legislature to amend its reapportionment plan, and subsequent decisions forced other states to do the same. A number of incumbent minority legislators found themselves running for reelection in districts that no longer had a high proportion of minority voters. Many minority groups saw this as a reversal in their quest for greater representation. Some even claimed that Miller was akin to the 1857 Scott v. Sandford decision, which held that African Americans “had no rights which the white man was bound to respect.” However, in a significant development, many of those same legislators were in fact reelected in their newly white-dominated districts. Steve D. Boilard

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Further Reading Bernstein, Mark F. “Racial Gerrymandering.” Public Interest (Winter, 1996): 59-70. Rush, Mark E., ed. Voting Rights and Redistricting in the United States. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1998. Savage, David G. “The Redistricting Tangle.” State Legislatures (September, 1995): 20-24. Swain, Carol M. “Limited Racial Gerrymandering.” Current (January, 1996): 3-6. See also Compromise of 1877; Council of Federated Organizations; Disfranchisement laws in Mississippi; Fifteenth Amendment; Gomillion v. Lightfoot; Keyes v. Denver School District No. 1; Nixon v. Condon; Nixon v. Herndon; Politics and government; Shaw v. Hunt; Smith v. Allwright; Terry v. Adams; Voting Rights Act of 1965; Voting Rights Act of 1975; White primaries

Gomillion v. Lightfoot The Case: U.S. Supreme Court ruling on gerrymandering Date: November 14, 1960 The Supreme Court struck down racial gerrymandering in Tuskegee, Alabama, opening the door for a reconsideration of the justiciability of redistricting cases. Justice Felix Frankfurter wrote the unanimous opinion of the Court overturning the arbitrary redrawing of the city limit lines in Tuskegee, Alabama, in such a way as to eliminate all but four or five African American voters while eliminating no white voters. In doing so, Frankfurter had to get around his own opinion in Colegrove v. Green (1946) in which he had concluded that legislative redistricting was a political question best left to the legislature. He did not drop his opposition to general judicial review of legislative districts, using the Fifteenth Amendment’s voting rights principle rather than the Fourteenth Amendment in his reasoning in Gomillion. He defended his Colegrove opinion in his dissent in Baker v. Carr (1962). Justices William O. Douglas and Charles E. Whittaker concurred but said they would have struck

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down the gerrymandering on Fourteenth Amendment grounds, foreshadowing the overturning of Colegrove by Baker. Richard L. Wilson See also Fifteenth Amendment; Gerrymandering; Voting Rights Act of 1965

Grandfather clauses Definition: Legal provision enacted in some southern states after the passage of the Fifteenth Amendment that exempted men who could vote before 1866 and their descendants from suffrage restrictions such as literacy tests and poll taxes Until the Supreme Court struck down grandfather clauses as a violation of the Fifteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, states used this as a method to disenfranchise African Americans and allow illiterate white men to vote. The Fifteenth Amendment, adopted in 1870, guaranteed that citizens of the United States could not be denied their right to vote by the federal or state government on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude. However, many southern states passed laws, including grandfather clauses, designed to disfranchise African Americans through literacy tests or poll taxes. Guinn v. United States (1915) involved an Oklahoma law that required all voters to prove that they or a direct ancestor could vote before 1866 or to pass a literacy test. The Supreme Court found the grandfather clause to be an unconstitutional evasion of the Fifteenth Amendment. Although the Oklahoma provision did not directly cite race, most white men could prove that an ancestor could vote. Therefore, it was mostly people of color who were forced to take the literacy test. In Lance v. Wilson (1939), the Court ruled that literacy tests were also unconstitutional. Siobhan McCabe Matthew Lindstrom

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See also Civil Rights Acts of 1866-1875; Civil Rights movement; Fifteenth Amendment; Guinn v. United States; Politics and government; Poll taxes; Voting Rights Act of 1965; White primaries

Great Migration The Event: Movement of more than one million African Americans from the rural South and Midwest to northern cities Date: c. 1910-1930 The Great Migration ended with the beginning of the Great Depression. Poverty and the intense competition with Euro-Americans for scarce jobs, caused African Americans from the South to consider the North a less desirable destination in which to live and work. The Great Migration, a demographic shift of African Americans from southern states to midwestern and northeastern states, occurred roughly between 1910 and 1930. Because migration figures are based on the U.S. census, which is conducted every tenth year, the dating of migration events is imprecise. The data indicate only that this migration took place sometime between 1910 and 1930, but other historical evidence suggests that it began sometime during World War I (between 1914 and 1918) and ended around the onset of the Great Depression in 1929. During the Great Migration, the industrial northern and midwestern states of New York, Illinois, Pennsylvania, Ohio, and Michigan experienced the greatest net migration of African Americans. The greatest net loss of African American population was from the southern, agricultural states of Georgia, South Carolina, Virginia, Alabama, and Mississippi. As they moved from one region to another, most of the migrants also moved from rural areas to urban areas. Between 1910 and 1920, the African American population of Detroit grew from 5,000 to 40,800; that of Cleveland from 8,400 to 34,400; that of Chicago from 44,000 to 109,400; and that of New York from 91,700 to 152,400. The transition from rural to urban locales was accompanied by a transition from employment in agriculture to employment in industrial or service occupations for increasing numbers of African Americans.

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Reasons for Leaving The reasons that African Americans did not leave the South in large numbers until fifty years after the end of the Civil War have been the subject of debate among social scientists and historians. Both social and economic factors were involved. After the Civil War, owners of plantations and farms in the South imposed new ways of controlling labor that were almost as restrictive as slavery had been. As sharecroppers, former slaves and their descendants were allowed to farm land belonging to the property owner in return for part of the harvest. These arrangements usually left the sharecroppers perpetually indebted to the landowners, so that they were financially obligated to stay on the land although legally they were free to leave. In addition, many African Americans who were born during the period of slavery were accustomed or resigned to their inferior social and economic positions and were reluctant to seek change. According to W. E. B. Du Bois, a leading African American intellectual of the period, African Americans who came of age around 1910 were the first generation for whom slavery was a

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distant memory. Jim Crow laws that formalized segregation and discrimination and racial violence that included lynchings motivated many in this new generation of African Americans to seek better conditions in the North. Because the vast majority of African Americans in the South worked in agriculture, particularly in the production of cotton, several bad crop years and a boll weevil infestation in the mid1910’s contributed to the decision on the part of some to migrate when they did. The increase in out-migration was greatest in the areas that experienced the greatest crop failures. Changing Conditions Changing conditions in the North also played an important role in the timing of the Great Migration. Prior to World War I, immigration from Europe had supplied the labor needs of northern industry, and African Americans in northern cities usually could find work only as servants, porters, janitors, or waiters. Most industries hired African Americans only during strikes, as a way to exert pressure on Euro-American workers. Restrictions imposed during World War I reduced the number of European immigrants entering the United States by more than 90 percent, from 1.2 million in 1914 to 110,000 in 1918. This reduction in the available labor force took place just as the war increased demand for industrial production. Northern factories, mills, and workshops that previously had disdained African American workers were forced actively to recruit them, offering wages that were often twice what African Americans could earn in the South, plus inducements such as free rooms and train fare. Northward migration was encouraged by news of opportunities spread not only by personal letters home from new arrivals but also by advertisements and articles in newspapers such as the Chicago Defender, published by Robert Abbott, an African American editor. In some industries, managers attempted to foster racial division among their workers by encouraging segregated labor unions. The strategy was effective, and workplace competition sometimes contributed to antagonism and racial violence.

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Percentages of African American and White Americans Living in Rural Areas, 1870-2000 African Year American White 1870

85.7

72.4

1880

85.9

68.0

1900

76.1

59.0

1910

71.4

50.8

1920

63.6

46.5

1930

NA

NA

1940

51.3

38.9

1950

43.5

38.0

1960

26.8

29.4

1970

NA

NA

1980

18.1

20.5

1990

18.5

34.9

2000

10.3

24.8

Source: Steven Ruggles et al., Integrated Public Use Microdata Series: Version 3.0 (Minneapolis: Minnesota Population Center, 2004).

Forming of Communities African Americans in northern cities established their own communities, including the Manhattan neighborhood of Harlem. Although it was primarily occupied by wealthy European Americans at the beginning of the twentieth century, African Americans had been in Harlem since Dutch colonial times. Philip A. Payton, Jr., was among several African American business people who saw an opportunity when a housing glut in Harlem coincided with an influx of African Americans. He leased apartment buildings and rented the apartments to African American tenants, antagonizing some of the wealthy Euro-American residents. Harlem was soon an almost exclusively African American enclave.

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Harlem became not only a home for African American workers but also a center of intellectual, cultural, and political development. The Harlem Renaissance, fostered by such African American intellectuals as Du Bois and the poet Langston Hughes, was embraced by white liberals as an alternative to bourgeois American culture. Harlem also became known for African American performing arts, which attracted many white visitors seeking entertainment. Jamaican-born Marcus Garvey arrived in 1916 to establish a branch of his newly formed Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA), which was intended to unite all the “Negro peoples of the world.” The UNIA flourished in New York and other northern cities during the 1920’s. Garvey encouraged African Americans to take pride in their heritage and to establish their own businesses. The Great Migration ended with the onset of the Great Depression. Because of poverty and the fierce competition with EuroAmericans for scarce jobs, African Americans from the South found the North to be a less desirable destination. During the 1930’s, net migration of African Americans from the South was diminished by about one-half, to 347,500. The Great Migration set the stage, however, for subsequent migrations of African Americans that would be even greater in absolute numbers. By the 1940’s, the trend had reversed again, with net migration growing to 1,244,700, a level that would be sustained or exceeded during subsequent decades. James Hayes-Bohanan Further Reading Eric Arnesen’s Black Protest and the Great Migration: A Brief History with Documents (Boston: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2003) provides details of the migration. Nicholas Lemann’s The Promised Land: The Great Black Migration and How It Changed America (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1991) describes the second Great Migration, which began in the 1940’s, and includes biographical sketches of individual migrant families and a comprehensive discussion of political implications. The Black American Reference Book (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1976), edited by Mabel M. Smythe, provides demographic details of the migration. Ronald

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Takaki’s “To the Promised Land: Blacks in the Urban North,” in A Different Mirror: A History of Multicultural America (Boston: Little, Brown, 1993), uses primary sources, including music, advertisements, and letters, to detail the impacts of the migration on northern urban culture and labor relations. See also Agriculture; Black flight; Demographic trends; Economic trends; Employment; Harlem Renaissance; Music; National Urban League; Sharecropping; Slavery and race relations; Universal Negro Improvement Association

Green v. County School Board of New Kent County The Case: U.S. Supreme Court ruling on school integration and busing Date: May 27, 1968 In this Supreme Court case, the Court ruled for the first time that school boards have an affirmative duty to desegregate their schools, and it disallowed freedom-of-choice desegregation plans that do not result in substantial pupil mixing. In the wake of the Court’s 1954 decision in Brown v. Board of Education that outlawed school segregation, few southern school boards took action to integrate their schools. Finally, in the mid1960’s, under the threat of federal fund cutoffs and adverse court decisions, most southern school boards made some effort to integrate their schools. Many such school boards did so by adopting an assignment system whereby students were permitted to choose which school they wished to attend. Most such freedomof-choice plans resulted in little racial integration. Black students typically chose to attend traditionally black schools, whereas white students chose to attend traditionally white schools. As a result, schools remained racially segregated in many southern school districts following the introduction of free-choice plans.

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One school district that adopted a free-choice plan during the 1960’s was the school district in New Kent County, Virginia. New Kent County is a rural county; its student population was about half black and half white, with black and white people scattered throughout the county. Prior to 1965, the schools in New Kent County had been completely segregated, with all the black students attending the county’s one black school and all the white students attending the county’s one white school. In 1965, the school board adopted a free-choice plan whereby every student was permitted to choose between the two schools. As a result of the free choice, all the white students chose to remain in the white school and 85 percent of the black students chose to remain in the black school. A group of black parents, with the assistance of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) Legal Defense and Educational Fund, filed a lawsuit challenging this free-choice plan. These parents contended that the plan was deficient because it did not effectively dismantle the old dual school system. The Supreme Court, faced with thirteen years of southern school board recalcitrance on school desegregation, agreed that the school board’s free-choice plan did not satisfy constitutional standards and announced that the school board had an affirmative duty to devise a desegregation plan that actually resulted in substantial pupil mixing. This decision, the Supreme Court’s most important school desegregation decision since the 1954 Brown decision, helped transform school desegregation law by forcing school boards to devise assignment plans that resulted in greater integration. In the wake of the Green decision, lower courts throughout the South required school boards to take additional action to integrate their schools. Davison M. Douglas See also Alexander v. Holmes County Board of Education; Brown v. Board of Education; Civil Rights movement; National Association for the Advancement of Colored People; Segregation

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Greensboro sit-ins The Event: Antisegregation protest started by college students Date: February, 1960-July, 1960 Place: Greensboro, North Carolina Using a tactic developed earlier by the Congress of Racial Equality, the Greensboro sit-ins led to the integration of variety-store lunch counters and inspired similar direct-action tactics across the South. Despite court decisions, limited integration of public schools, and events such as the Montgomery bus boycott, much of American life remained racially segregated as the United States entered the 1960’s. This was especially true in the southern and border states, where the Jim Crow system of legally imposed racial separation remained largely intact. One symbol of the discrimination suffered by southerners of African descent was the fact that while they could shop in variety stores, there were not allowed to sit down and eat at the lunch counters often found in such establishments. Segregation in Greensboro In 1960, Greensboro, North Carolina, was a rapidly growing city of 120,000 that prided itself on the progressive nature of its race relations. Segregated conditions were as characteristic of Greensboro, however, as they were of cities with reputations for racial violence and intimidation. Despite the fact that Greensboro had been one of the few southern cities to accept publicly the Supreme Court’s 1954 decision in Brown v. Board of Education that overturned the doctrine of “separate but equal” in public education, the city had permitted only token integration of its schools. Its lunch counters would serve African Americans only if they stood, and the color line was effectively maintained in most areas of the city’s life. The prevailing order was unexpectedly challenged on February 1, 1960, when four college students from the all-black North Carolina Agricultural and Technical College (A & T) entered the Woolworth’s variety store in downtown Greensboro. To illustrate the illogical nature of the system, the four first bought toothpaste and school supplies, carefully collecting their receipts as proof

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that the store would sell them merchandise. They then took seats at the lunch counter, to the amazement of store employees and other patrons. They were refused service and, after asking why Woolworth’s would sell them toothpaste but not coffee, they left the lunch counter. There was no confrontation with the police, although a reporter did arrive and news of the sit-in was reported by the local press. The four freshmen—Ezell Blair, Jr., Franklin McCain, Joseph McNeil, and David Richmond—had not launched their protest as part of an orchestrated campaign. Rather, they were encouraged to undertake a public act of protest against segregation by Ralph Johns, the white owner of a clothing store who employed A & T students. Johns provided the students with the money for the items they purchased at Woolworth’s and was also responsible for tipping off the newspaper. The students, however, acted on their own initiative and decided to challenge the Jim Crow system the night before the sit-in. During an animated discussion that night, triggered by Franklin McCain’s recent experience with segregated bus travel, they dared one another to act. The four later acknowledged the influence of Mohandas Gandhi’s example of nonviolence but stressed that their primary motivation derived from their own Christian convictions and sense of justice. Although all four had been youth members of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), neither it nor any other civil rights organization was involved in the initial sit-in. Protest Gathers Momentum News of the protest by the four freshmen spread rapidly over the A & T campus and throughout the city. A Student Executive Committee for Justice was quickly formed, with the four at the center. The next day, February 2, twenty-three additional students accompanied the original quartet to Woolworth’s. What had begun as a small protest began to grow, eventually becoming a mass movement. Soon the demonstrators were working in shifts, and the sit-in spread to Kress’s, the other downtown variety store. The demonstrators invariably were well dressed and emphasized their commitment to nonviolence. The stores refused

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to serve them but did not ask the local police to arrest them. White hecklers, one of whom tried to set the coat of a demonstrator on fire, created some tension. By the end of the week, the sit-ins had grown through the support of students from Bennett College, a black women’s college in town, as well as through some participation by students from Greensboro’s white colleges. Tensions ran high, however, and on February 6, a bomb scare prompted the closing of both the Woolworth and Kress stores. By this time, a well-organized student protest movement was in place, one that enjoyed wide support from Greensboro’s black community as well as national assistance from the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), which began to organize boycotts of Woolworth and Kress in some northern cities. On February 8, sit-ins began in the neighboring city of Winston-Salem, and from there the phenomenon quickly spread. In the wake of the bomb scare, the students agreed to a twoweek truce, which was subsequently extended as efforts began to negotiate an end to the protests. Edward R. Zane, a city council member who had strong ties to the local business community, pressed for action from Greensboro’s mayor, George Roach. The latter eventually agreed to create a committee to seek a negotiated settlement and named Zane to head it. The mayor’s committee was appointed at the end of February and spent all of March gathering information and attempting to mediate between the students and the stores. The committee’s mail showed that many in the community sympathized with the students’ position. Managers of the two stores, however, believed that they were being singled out unfairly and were unwilling to desegregate without other eating establishments doing the same. The city’s restaurants were unsympathetic to the variety stores’ plight, however. At the end of the month, the committee announced that it had failed to achieve a settlement. Standoff The sit-ins resumed on April 1. The next day, the two stores closed their lunch counters. Greensboro’s black community responded with an economic boycott and street demonstrations that demanded an end to segregated eating facilities. The pick-

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Students from North Carolina A&T College on the second day of the sit-in protest at Greensboro’s Woolworth lunch counter. (Library of Congress)

eting soon attracted counterpickets organized by the Ku Klux Klan, and the generally peaceful confrontations between the two groups became a feature of life in downtown Greensboro. Kress’s reopened its lunch counter later in the month but roped it off to allow store personnel to control access. When students peacefully moved into the restricted area, some forty-five of them were arrested, including three of the “Greensboro Four.” This was the only mass arrest during the sit-in campaign. The students were released without bail. As the stand-off continued, downtown stores found that their business was falling off; Woolworth’s sales fell by 20 percent. The economic boycott was directly effective, and in addition many whites stayed away to avoid whatever trouble might occur downtown. In these circumstances, pressure for a settlement mounted. The local newspapers had for some time been sympathetic to the demonstrators’ aims, if not always with their methods. Civic leaders and businesspeople not only worried about lost revenue but also feared the loss of Greensboro’s progressive image. In June, Zane’s committee undertook further negotiations. Finally, the stores agreed to the committee’s recommenda-

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tion that they desegregate their lunch counters, although they waited until school was out in order to avoid the appearance of giving in to the students. Without public announcement, the lunch counters desegregated on July 25, 1960. The first black patrons served were the stores’ own employees. A New Phase in the Civil Rights Movement The Greensboro sit-ins marked the opening of a major new phase in the Civil Rights movement, one characterized by largescale, grass-roots protests against segregated conditions in public accommodations. Such direct action tactics, rather than protracted legal battles in the courts, would mark the Civil Rights movement of the first half of the 1960’s. It was after Greensboro that the struggle for civil rights truly became a mass movement. The sit-ins in Greensboro were neither the first sit-ins nor the first protests against segregated lunch counters. Facilities in Oklahoma City and Wichita had been desegregated by similar tactics in 1958. It was the Greensboro sit-ins, however, that touched off the tidal wave of direct, confrontational protest that marked the early 1960’s. Sit-in protests spread from Greensboro to other cities in North Carolina, then to Nashville and on to dozens of other southern cities as well as a number in the North. By the end of 1960, approximately one hundred southern cities had experienced sit-ins and roughly one-third of them had desegregated their lunch counters. More would follow in subsequent years. Approximately seventy thousand people participated in the sitins, making the movement the most massive expression of discontent with the racial status quo that the country had yet seen. African American and sympathetic whites were inspired to confront other forms of segregation, and it became increasingly difficult for other whites to maintain that southern African Americans were basically content and were only being stirred up by outside agitators. In cities where lunch counters were desegregated, white patrons quickly adjusted, casting further doubt on the proposition that southern race relations were impervious to change. For Greensboro, the sit-ins marked the beginning of a decade of periodic protests and change. The spring of 1963 would see

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more than one thousand arrests as demonstrators sought to desegregate a range of public accommodations. Out of this later round of protests would emerge Jesse Jackson, then a student at A & T. In 1969, another period of demonstrations resulted in violence in which an A & T student was killed and several police officers injured. The Greensboro sit-ins also marked something of a generational shift in the Civil Rights movement. Although they had received endorsement by the local NAACP chapter and some organizational support from CORE, the sit-ins had not been initiated by any of the major civil rights organizations but by four college students. In part, they grew out of the impatience of the younger generation of black southerners with the pace of change in race relations. It was largely the young who answered the call, first in Greensboro and later in other cities. While the sit-ins were still going on in Greensboro, Ella Baker of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference organized a meeting of black student leaders from throughout the South at Shaw University in Raleigh, North Carolina (April 15-17, 1960). Martin Luther King, Jr., and other civil rights leaders addressed the students, who decided to set up their own organization. Out of their efforts was born the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. SNCC (“snick”), as it came to be known, quickly became one of the most active and militant civil rights organizations of the 1960’s and was involved in most of the major civil rights campaigns of the decade. In a broader context, the student activism embodied in the sit-ins and the SNCC helped to inspire the organization of the Students for a Democratic Society later in 1960, as well as contributing to the more general campus unrest of the decade. Nationally, the sit-in movement that spread from Greensboro helped to push civil rights onto the nation’s political agenda. Ultimately, the campaign against segregated facilities that began in Greensboro would help to secure passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, a measure that outlawed racial segregation in eating places and other public accommodations. William C. Lowe

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Further Reading Carson, Clayborne. In Struggle: SNCC and the Black Awakening of the 1960’s. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1981. The standard history of the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee, the most prominent organization to arise from the sit-in movement. Illustrates one of the major organizational effects of the Greensboro sit-ins. Bibliography and index. Chafe, William H. Civilities and Civil Rights: Greensboro, North Carolina, and the Black Struggle for Freedom. New York: Oxford University Press, 1980. The definitive study of the Civil Rights movement in Greensboro. Contains a chapter on the sit-ins. Especially effective at bringing out the differences between black and white perspectives. Indispensable for seeing the sitins in their local context. Includes an informative “Note on Sources” and an index. Goldfield, David R. Black, White and Southern: Race Relations and Southern Culture, 1940 to the Present. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1990. Good overall treatment of race relations that places the Civil Rights movement within the overall context of southern culture. Provides a useful picture of the racial etiquette that underpinned the Jim Crow system. Sees the Greensboro sit-ins as pivotal in extending the Civil Rights movement across the South. Bibliography and index. Morris, Aldon. Origins of the Civil Rights Movement: Black Communities Organizing for Change. New York: Free Press, 1984. A combination of history and sociology that explores the Civil Rights movement through 1963 by focusing on the organizations involved. Its account of the sit-ins differs from others in the importance it places on pre-existing organizations, both in providing a background and in facilitating the movement’s spread. Bibliography and index. Oppenheimer, Martin. The Sit-In Movement of 1960. Brooklyn: Carlson Publishing, 1989. Originally written as a doctoral dissertation in sociology in 1963. Provides a nearly contemporary perspective on the sit-in movement as a whole. Useful for placing events in Greensboro in overall context. Bibliography and index.

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Raines, Howell. My Soul Is Rested: Movement Days in the Deep South Remembered. New York: Penguin, 1983. An oral history of the Civil Rights movement. Includes an interview with Franklin McCain that provides a firsthand account of the original Greensboro sit-in. Other interviews show how quickly the sitin movement spread. Index but no bibliography. Wolff, Miles. Lunch at the Five and Ten. Rev. ed. Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 1990. First published in 1970, this is a highly readable account of the Greensboro sit-ins based in part on interviews with the major participants. Contains an interesting epilogue that provides accounts of the subsequent careers of the Greensboro Four. Also contains a useful introduction by August Meier. Lacks a bibliography but includes an index. Zinn, Howard. SNCC: The New Abolitionists. Cambridge, Mass.: South End Press, 2002. Though less comprehensive than Carson’s work listed above, this is a contemporary account written by a historian who served as an adviser to the SNCC. Vividly brings out the student context in which the sit-in movement began and spread. See also Chicago sit-ins; Civil Rights movement; Congress of Racial Equality; Freedom Rides; Sit-ins

Griffin v. Breckenridge The Case: U.S. Supreme Court ruling on equal protection of the law Date: June 7, 1971 This decision extended federal civil rights guarantees of equal protection of the law to the protection of personal rights not only from state action but from personal conspiraces as well. The Supreme Court’s Griffin v. Breckenridge decision extended federal civil rights guarantees of equal protection of the law to the protection of personal rights. On July 2, 1966, a group of African Americans who were suspected of being civil rights workers were halted on a Mississippi highway near the Alabama border

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by Lavon and Calvin Breckenridge, who purposely blocked the road with their car. The Breckenridges forced the passengers from their vehicle and then subjected them to intimidation with firearms. The travellers were clubbed about their heads, beaten with pipes and other weapons, and repeatedly threatened with death. Although terrorized and seriously injured, the travellers (who included Griffin) survived. They subsequently filed a suit for damages, charging that they had been assaulted for the purpose of preventing them and “other Negro-Americans” from enjoying the equal rights, privileges, and immunities of citizens of the state of Mississippi and of the United States, including the rights to free speech, assembly, association, and movement and the right not to be enslaved. A federal district court dismissed the complaint by relying on a previous U.S. Supreme Court decision, Collins v. Hardyman (1951), which in order to avoid difficult constitutional issues had held that federal law extended only to “conspiracies” condoned or perpetrated by states. That is, the Court tried to avoid opening questions involving congressional power or the content of state as distinct from national citizenship, or interfering in local matters such as assault and battery cases or similar illegalities that clearly fell under local jurisdiction. The Collins case, however, had been decided a decade before the nationwide Civil Rights movement of the 1960’s, a period marked by the enactment of a new series of federal civil rights laws as well as by attentive regard by the U.S. Supreme Court of Chief Justice Warren Burger to cases involving civil rights violations. The Burger court heard the Griffin case on appeal. The Supreme Court’s unanimous decision in Griffin was delivered by Justice Potter Stewart on June 7, 1971. The Court broadly interpreted the federal statute under which Griffin brought damages, Title 42 of the U.S. Code, section 1985. Section 1985 stipulated that if two or more persons conspired or went in disguise on public highways with the intent to deprive any person or any class of persons of equal protection of the laws or of equal privileges and immunities under the laws, a conspiracy

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existed and damages could be brought. The Court waived consideration of whether the Collins case had been correctly decided. Instead, reviewing previous civil rights legislation, starting in 1866, the justices determined that the language of the federal statute clearly indicated that state action was not required to invoke federal protection of constitutionally guaranteed personal rights from impairment by personal conspiracies. Griffin effectively extended federal safeguards of civil rights to reach private conspiracies under the Thirteenth Amendment as well as under congressional powers to protect the right of interstate travel. Clifton K. Yearley See also Civil Rights movement; Civil rights worker murders; Jones v. Alfred H. Mayer Company

Griggs v. Duke Power Company The Case: U.S. Supreme Court ruling on employment discrimination Date: March 8, 1971 In this case, the Supreme Court interpreted Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 to require employers to show that hiring practices that disfavor members of minorities or women are clearly based on applicants’ job skills. The Civil Rights Act of 1964, Title VII, prohibited workplace segregation. Shortly after the law took effect in mid-1965, Duke Power Company in North Carolina rescinded its policy of restricting African Americans to its labor department, so in principle they could transfer to other departments. Nevertheless, according to a company policy, begun in 1955, all employees but those in Duke’s labor department had to have a high school diploma. Therefore, all those applying for a transfer from the labor department in 1965 needed a diploma. For those lacking a high school diploma (African Americans were far less likely to have completed twelve grades than whites in that part of North Caro-

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lina), an alternative was to score at the national median on two standardized aptitude tests. Willie Griggs and coworkers in the labor department at the company’s Dan River steam-generating plant filed a class-action charge with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC), which ruled in favor of Griggs. When the company refused to conciliate the case, Griggs and his coworkers filed suit in district court. The court held that a claim of prior inequities was beyond the scope of Title VII and that the requirements for a high school diploma or a passing score on standardized tests were not intentionally discriminatory. The district court’s decision was overruled by the Supreme Court. Chief Justice Warren Burger delivered a unanimous Supreme Court opinion (8 to 0), setting forth the adverse impact test. According to this principle, if statistics show that a job requirement screens out one race, the employer must prove that the requirement is relevant to the performance of the job. Since the percentage of black high school graduates and percentages of African Americans who passed the two tests were substantially below percentages for whites, Duke Power had to prove that the jobs sought by Griggs and his coworkers required completing high school or having a level of intelligence at the national median. Since the company advanced no such evidence, the Court ruled that Title VII discrimination had occurred and decreed that “any tests used must measure the person for the job and not the person in the abstract.” The decision had an extremely broad impact: It called into question all lists of qualifications for every job in the United States. Employers were called upon to review job qualifications and to recalibrate job duties to job qualifications or risk successful discrimination suits. In the 1980’s the Supreme Court began to chip away at the Griggs ruling. In Wards Cove Packing Company v. Atonio (1989), the Court shifted the burden of proof so that those filing suit must prove that specific job requirements alone cause statistical disparities. Congress responded by passing the Civil Rights Act of 1991, codifying the original Griggs ruling into law. Michael Haas

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See also Adarand Constructors v. Peña; Affirmative action; Albemarle Paper Company v. Moody; Civil Rights Act of 1964; Civil Rights Act of 1991; Equal Employment Opportunity Commission; Washington v. Davis

Groves v. Slaughter The Case: U.S. Supreme Court ruling on slavery and interstate commerce Date: March 10, 1841 The Supreme Court held that an amendment to the Mississippi state constitution that banned bringing slaves into the state for sale was not valid in the absence of legislation to enforce it, but the majority could not agree on the constitutional issues of the case. The state of Mississippi added a constitutional prohibition against the importing of slaves into the state for sale in 1832 but did not enact any legislation to enforce the amendment. A seller of slaves argued that the prohibition was void because it conflicted with federal authority over interstate commerce. The Supreme Court, in a 5-2 majority decision, held that the amendment to the Mississippi constitution was not binding because it was not implemented by legislation. By ruling that the amendment was not self-executing, the Court did not resolve the explosive issue of whether the federal government or the states had control over the slave trade. In concurring opinions, Justice John McLean of Ohio wrote that the federal government had jurisdiction over slaves transported in interstate commerce, and Chief Justice Roger Brooke Taney insisted that states had control of all questions relating to slavery and African Americans. The deep divisions on the Court reflected the growing sectional controversy in the country. Thomas Tandy Lewis See also Slavery; Slavery and race relations; Slavery and the justice system

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Grovey v. Townsend The Case: U.S. Supreme Court ruling on white primaries Date: April 1, 1935 In the third round of the white primary cases, the Supreme Court accepted the right of political parties—acting as private organizations—to exclude African Americans from voting in primaries. One of the most successful devices in eliminating black voters in the South was the white primary. Since the Democratic Party dominated the solid South, whoever won the Democratic primary went on to win the general election. If African Americans could not participate in the primaries, they were denied any real choice in selecting public officials. In Newberry v. United States (1921), the U.S. Supreme Court held that primary elections were not constitutionally protected. Although the Newberry case took place in Michigan and involved the issue of vote fraud rather than racial discrimination, the South immediately took advantage of the ruling. In 1924 the Texas legislature passed a law that barred African Americans from participation in that state’s primary elections. Three years later, a unanimous Supreme Court struck down the Texas law in Nixon v. Herndon (1927), finding the actions of the Texas legislature a clear violation of the equal protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. The Texas legislature then passed a law authorizing the executive committees of the political parties to determine eligibility for voting in primary elections. As expected, the executive committee of the Texas Democratic Party excluded African Americans from the primary. In Nixon v. Condon (1932), in a 5-4 decision, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that the executive committee had acted as the agent of the state. As such, the attempt to bar black participation in the primary still violated the equal protection clause. Texas succeeded on its third attempt to ban black voting. Immediately after the Condon decision, the Texas Democratic Party convention, without any authorization from the legislature, adopted a resolution restricting party membership to whites.

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R. R. Grovey, a black resident of Houston, brought suit against the county clerk who refused to give him a primary ballot. On April 1, 1935, a unanimous U.S. Supreme Court upheld the actions of the state party convention. According to the Court, there was no violation of the equal protection clause because there was no state action involved. The Democratic Party was a voluntary association of individuals who acted in their private capacity to exclude African Americans from primary elections. In 1941 the U.S. Supreme Court reversed Newberry in United States v. Classic (1941). The Classic decision brought primary elections under constitutional protection for the first time. Classic also paved the way for Smith v. Allwright (1944), the Supreme Court case banning white primaries. Darryl Paulson See also National Association for the Advancement of Colored People; Newberry v. United States; Nixon v. Condon; Nixon v. Herndon; Smith v. Allwright; United States v. Classic; White primaries

Guinn v. United States The Case: U.S. Supreme Court ruling on right to vote and race discrimination Date: June 21, 1915 The Supreme Court’s decision in this case overturned Oklahoma’s grandfather clause and marked a first step in the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People’s campaign to use the courts to combat racial discrimination. Though the Fifteenth Amendment supposedly prohibited racial discrimination in voting, during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries southern and border states found ways to prevent African Americans from voting in significant numbers. One method was the literacy test. One potential drawback to this practice, however, was that such a test would also prevent poorly educated whites from voting. A number of states solved this problem by adopting grandfather clauses, provisions that al-

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lowed anyone registered before a certain date or anyone descended from such a person to vote regardless of literacy. Since the date selected was usually set at a point when there would have been few black voters (1866 was popular), very few African Americans would qualify. Thus a measure that was nonracial on the surface was decidedly discriminatory in its effects. Many grandfather laws had only temporary application, and most southern states moved away from them in the early twentieth century. In 1910, however, Oklahoma enacted a literacy test requirement with a permanent grandfather clause. The measure threatened not only black voting rights but also the position of the state’s Republican Party. Fearing the loss of several thousand black votes, the U.S. attorney brought suit under the Reconstruction-era Enforcement Acts and won a conviction against state officials who were trying to enforce the literacy test. The state appealed the case to the U.S. Supreme Court, attracting the attention of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), which was just beginning to use litigation as a strategy for combating racial discrimination. Moorfield Story of the NAACP filed a brief in support of the government. In a unanimous decision, the Court upheld the convictions and ruled that the grandfather clause was a clear attempt to thwart the Fifteenth Amendment’s ban on racial discrimination in voting. The decision had relatively little immediate impact: Only one other state still had a grandfather clause at the time, and the Court carefully avoided declaring literacy tests themselves discriminatory. Nevertheless, the decision was not without its significance. Not only did it mark a modest revival of the Fifteenth Amendment, but it also encouraged the NAACP to continue its strategy of using litigation to put the Constitution on the side of racial equality. William C. Lowe See also Fifteenth Amendment; Grandfather clauses; Jim Crow laws; National Association for the Advancement of Colored People

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Haitians Identification: Immigrants from the West Indian nation of Haiti Haitians have immigrated to the United States, particularly New York and Florida, in significant numbers since the 1950’s. U.S. policy toward these immigrants has been generally unreceptive since the 1970’s, treating them as economic migrants rather than as refugees. During the 1980’s and early 1990’s, many Haitians seeking asylum in the United States were intercepted at sea and forced to return to Haiti. This treatment contrasts with that of Cuban asylum seekers, who have generally received a generous welcome to U.S. shores as legitimate refugees. The U.S. government’s differential treatment of Cubans fleeing the Marxist-dominated Fidel Castro government and of Haitians fleeing a very poor country governed by right-wing repressive leaders caused many to question U.S. refugee policy. In addition, Haitians speak Creole and are black, leading some to suggest latent racist motivations for the U.S. government’s actions. The Haitian Immigration Experience Haitians, like the peoples of most Caribbean islands, have for many decades participated in labor-based migration throughout the Caribbean region, including the United States. Haiti’s economy is among the poorest in the Western Hemisphere, providing a significant reason for migration. However, authoritarian regimes also contributed to migration, as some people fled political repression. In the 1950’s and 1960’s, skilled Haitian professionals legally entered the United States and Canada as permanent or temporary immigrants. Although many left Haiti in part because of political repression, they were treated as economic immigrants rather than refugees. Legal immigration continued throughout the 1970’s and 1980’s, but larger numbers of much poorer people also began to leave Haiti by boat. For many years, Haiti was governed by the authoritarian regimes of François “Papa Doc” Duvalier and his son, Jean Claude “Baby Doc” Duvalier, who finally fled the country in 1986. A series of repressive regimes continued to rule the country until

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Haiti’s first democratically elected government, that of JeanBertrand Aristide, was established in 1990. This government was overthrown by a military coup in 1991 and had to be reinstalled by the international community in 1994, after three years of devastating economic sanctions imposed by the United Nations that, coupled with domestic political repression, precipitated large flows of refugees. The refugee flows subsided once the military regime gave up power, the U.N. peacekeeping forces were deployed, the Aristide government was reestablished, and the economic sanctions were removed. Thousands of Haitians have immigrated to the United States since the early 1970’s. Many thousands more were deported because they were judged to be lacking legitimate asylum claims. Those who managed to stay in the United States concentrated around already existing Haitian communities in Florida, especially in the Miami area, and in New York City, where several hundred thousand Haitians make their home. Lacking significant public assistance, the Haitians who settled in the United States during the 1970’s and 1980’s were obliged to rely on aid from charitable organizations and the already established local Haitian communities. Reactions to the Immigrants Reactions to the Haitian migration varied considerably. Generally, the earlier and more skilled migration out of Haiti was noncontroversial. As larger numbers of poorer Haitians, especially the “boat people,” sought entry into the United States, however, concern about the economic implications of these undocumented migrants arose. Local politicians—especially in southern Florida and under pressure from their constituents, including elite members of the Cuban exile group—along with others concerned about the potentially disruptive Haitian flow, put pressure on Congress and successive presidents to deter the Haitian migration. However, steps by the federal government to staunch the Haitian migratory flows eventually prompted political opposition by second-generation Cuban Americans, voluntary agencies, human rights groups, and the Congressional Black Caucus.

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Many of these groups charged that the discriminatory treatment of Haitians was based at least in part on race. Efforts to detain Haitians in the United States were successfully challenged in court, and advocates for Haitians won a number of court-related victories to ensure fairer treatment for Haitian asylum seekers. The interdiction programs instituted by President Ronald Reagan, however, continued under the presidencies of George Bush and Bill Clinton. Only with the return of democracy to Haiti in 1994 did the migration pressures from Haiti to the United States ease. Twenty-first Century Prospects The return of stability to the Haitian political system and the application of considerable international economic assistance holds out hope that Haiti will benefit from economic development, thus encouraging investment at home and further reducing pressures for migration abroad. The booming economy in the United States during the 1990’s and the reduction in illegal and undocumented migration from Haiti helped to reduce the controversy surrounding Haitian migration. Robert F. Gorman Further Reading Three books which discuss the Haitian experience in the United States are Flore Zéphir’s The Haitian Americans (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 2004), Michel S. Laguerre’s Diasporic Citizenship: Haitian Americans in Transnational America (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1998) and Alex Stepick’s Pride Against Prejudice: Haitians in the United States (Boston: Allyn and Bacon, 1998). Stepick’s Haitian Refugees in the U.S. (London: Minority Rights Group, 1982) and Jake Miller’s The Plight of Haitian Refugees (New York: Praeger, 1984) provide critiques of the Haitian predicament in the United States. To set the Haitian situation into the wider immigration experience, see Alejandro Portes and Rubén G. Rumbaut’s Immigrant America: A Portrait (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990). For a contrast of the Cuban and Haitian refugee and resettlement experience, see Felix R. Masud-Piloto’s From Welcomed Exiles to Illegal Immigrants (Lan-

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ham, Md.: Rowman & Littlefield, 1996). On the foreign policy implications of U.S. Haitian policy, see Western Hemisphere Immigration and United States Foreign Policy (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1992), edited by Christopher Mitchell. See also Cubans and African Americans; Jamaicans; West Indians

Hampton-Clark deaths The Event: Concerted effort by law enforcement to destroy New Left and African American radical organizations Date: December 4, 1969 Place: Illinois Black Panther members Fred Hampton and Mark Clark were killed by Illinois state police officers. Twenty-one-year-old Fred Hampton and twenty-two-year-old Mark Clark were leaders in the Illinois branch of the Black Panther Party, a radical African American organization that had a reputation for militancy and was dedicated to equality between whites and African Americans; the group was particularly active in Chicago, where it had a large membership. On December 4, 1969, Clark and Hampton were killed during an early-morning raid on their apartment by members of the Illinois state police. The police fired between eighty-two and one hundred shots through the door at the apartment’s inhabitants. Hampton, chairman of the Illinois branch of the Black Panther Party, was hit four times, twice in the head. Clark, a Panther leader from Peoria, Illinois, fired a single shot at the police (the only shot fired during the incident by those inside) before being killed. Four of the seven other Panthers in the apartment, including Hampton’s pregnant girlfriend, were wounded. Hampton was probably drugged the previous evening by police and Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) informant William O’Neal, who had provided police and members of the FBI with a map of the apartment showing where Clark and Hampton slept.

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After the killings, the Panthers opened the apartment for public viewing. Thousands walked through the quarters and saw for themselves the damage the police had done. The Illinois attorney general filed charges of attempted murder against the surviving Panthers. His office supported police attempts to characterize the attack as a shootout in which police acted in self-defense. These attempts included lying to the media about a gun Hampton was said to have fired (paraffin tests later proved Hampton had not fired any weapon) and stating that nail holes in the apartment door were actually bullet holes from weapons fired by the Panthers. Aftermath The Hampton-Clark killings convinced many Americans that the U.S. government meant to eradicate the Panthers and other African American radicals. That police would kill citizens as they slept and execute a concerted coverup dramatized the extremes to which government agencies would go. The overall, eventual effect of the murders was to create sympathy for the Panthers among whites and African Americans. A federal grand jury was empaneled in January, 1970, and was subsequently disbanded four months later without indicting anyone. Charges against the Panthers were dropped soon after. A state grand jury was empaneled and in April, 1971, indicted twelve police officers, the state attorney general, and another member of his office for obstruction of justice. The case went to trial in July, 1972. In October, 1972, the judge acquitted the defendants on all charges without requiring them to present their case. Hampton and Clark’s families sued the state of Illinois, the state attorney general, and the police in 1970, but the case was delayed until all criminal proceedings were through. A third criminal trial began in 1976 and ended in another acquittal by the bench, despite a deadlocked jury. This acquittal was overturned in a federal appeals court in 1979 and was upheld by the U.S. Supreme Court in June, 1980. Meanwhile, declassified FBI files revealed the existence of a concerted FBI offensive against the Panthers and other African American and left-wing organizations. The civil trial brought by the slain men’s families began in 1976

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after a series of government delays. On February 28, 1983, the families of Hampton and Clark received a settlement of $1.85 million. Ron Jacobs Further Reading Journalist Paul Engleman wrote a long article twenty-five years after the raid entitled “Night of the Hunters” for Chicago Magazine (November, 1994). See also “Black Manifesto”; Black nationalism; Black Panther Party; Black Power movement; Civil Rights movement

Harlem Renaissance The Event: Flowering of black culture, a celebration of blackness, and a sense of racial pride that continued to fuel vital works into the 1930’s and beyond Date: 1920’s-1935 Place: New York, New York The Harlem Renaissance served as a symbol and a reference point. It was a stepping-stone for black writers and artists who followed, more cultured and cynical but proclaiming loudly and clearly that African Americans must be free to be themselves. In the years after World War I, Harlem’s population was almost entirely black; the New York borough constituted the largest center of urban African Americans anywhere. Black people poured in from all over America and the Caribbean, a migration at once optimistic and confident. During the 1920’s and well into the 1930’s, Harlem produced a cultural richness that made it a mecca for New Yorkers of all colors and creeds. Writers Writers and musicians were the heart of the Harlem Renaissance, helping to make Harlem a social and cultural magnet. Such writers as Claude McKay, Langston Hughes, and Countée Cullen

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were some of Harlem’s brightest stars. They fostered a nationalism and an ethnic pride that strongly influenced later black writers. Jamaican-born but having moved to the United States in 1912, Claude McKay glorified blackness. His fame rests on poems such as the first American collection of his work, Harlem Shadows, published in 1923. Although he had published three novels, some short stories, and an autobiography, McKay’s best work remains his poems, which celebrate the Harlem proletariat and call for racial militancy. McKay’s poems savored blackness in the midst of white hostility. His most famous poem, “If We Must Die,” is often cited for its militant spirit. In it, McKay calls upon black Americans to resist oppression even to death if necessary. The most popular writer of the Harlem Renaissance was Langston Hughes. A prolific writer, Hughes focused on the triumphs of the “little people” over adversity, the masses struggling to keep their American Dream alive. His characters, in both prose and poetry, suffer defeat and humiliation, but they are survivors. In such works as “The Weary Blues,” “Let America Be America Again,” and “Dreams,” Hughes proclaims the desire and the need to save democracy for all Americans. He evokes universal values, not only black ones. Like McKay and Hughes, Countée Cullen published poems in his youth, and by the early 1920’s, his poetry was highly popular. In 1925, he published his first collection of verse, Color, which revealed a strong sense of racial pride. His anthologies Caroling Dusk, Copper Sun, and The Ballad of the Brown Girl were published in 1927, but in these works Cullen generally reduced his references to race. Copper Sun, for example, had only seven “race” poems, a fact that disappointed many readers. Unlike McKay and Hughes, Cullen saw color in mostly negative terms, as in “The Shroud of Color,” which focuses on the burden of being black. Cullen implies that the black is an alien in America, an exile from the African homeland. The price of being black and striving for full human rights was portrayed as a crushing weight. With the publication of The Black Christ in 1929, Cullen clearly moved away from race, presenting himself as a poet, not a black poet. It was his protest poems, however, that earned Cullen lasting fame.

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African American music was also being accepted and promoted in American culture by the 1920’s. Jazz came of age, helped in large measure by white bandleader Paul Whiteman’s introduction of classical jazz to New York in 1924. Yet it was mainly black bandleaders such as Fletcher Henderson, Duke Ellington, and Louis Armstrong who popularized jazz in and beyond Harlem. The Growth of Jazz Jazz dates from the post-Civil War era, when it was created out of a mixture of the blues, worksongs, and spirituals. In the early twentieth century, New Orleans musicians were the first to employ jazz’s characteristic improvisation. Henderson, Ellington, and Armstrong brought the style—with modifications—to New York’s nightclubs, where both white and black patrons embraced it ardently. Ironically, the first major showplace for these bandleaders was the Cotton Club, which admitted only white people. The growth of jazz was aided by the rise of the recording industry, bringing jazz to parts of America lacking live performances. Some critics, many of them black intellectuals, considered jazz unrefined, too raw, and even denigrating to the African American image. On March 12, 1926, Harlem’s Savoy Ballroom opened, an architectural and musical phenomenon. Its sheer size and elegant furnishings awed patrons and made it a showplace for music and dancing. Fletcher Henderson’s orchestra performed there regularly, luring patrons with performer-audience interaction. Henderson is often credited with being the “father of swing,” although he was strongly influenced by a young solo trumpeter, Louis Armstrong. The Savoy was open to people of all classes and colors. Music was a serious business there; besides the Henderson and Ellington ensembles, the bands of Benny Goodman, Tommy Dorsey, Count Basie, and Louis Armstrong were frequent performers. The Savoy gave opportunity to many musical talents, including such future singing greats as Bessie Smith and Ella Fitzgerald. Duke Ellington expanded the boundaries of jazz as a composer and orchestrator. He was the master of form, a great synthesizer of jazz elements. His band developed a unique collaboration

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among leader, soloist, and group. Himself a fine pianist, Ellington refined jazz without taking away its spontaneity. Louis Armstrong made his impact primarily as a solo artist. As early as 1923, he was noted for his stylish playing as a solo trumpeter in the King Oliver Creole Jazz Band, and he played with the Fletcher Henderson Orchestra in 1924. Armstrong had an intuitive genius that transformed the sound of jazz. He became a popular singer as well, his records selling in the millions. These artists and many others contributed much to enrich black self-awareness and self-confidence. The 1930’s, however, brought the Harlem Renaissance to a halt. The Depression hit Harlem hard. African American financial institutions failed, taking with them not only financial savings but also many symbols of black aspiration. Yet the Harlem Renaissance continued until the riot of March 19, 1935. Responding to rumors of the death by beating of a black youth at the hands of police, thousands of Harlem residents went on a rampage, destroying not only millions of dollars worth of property but also hopes and dreams. The “New Negro” The Harlem Renaissance gave rise to the “New Negro,” proud of black culture yet determined to participate fully in American life. With Harlem in vogue during the 1920’s, white people flocked to its nightclubs and theaters, attracted by the exotic and lively culture. Among many African Americans, a new selfconsciousness and awareness was born. Black folktales and music were “discovered” and revitalized, serving as a therapy for both white and black. Harlem’s artists—writers, sculptors, musicians, dancers, and more—were very image-conscious. They promoted and advanced black talent, searching for black identity and a place within American society. They projected a black image that was respectable and strong, with character triumphing over race. Yet African Americans were proud of their distinctive characteristics, too, and did not want to reject their past totally, though cultural integrity and commercial success were sometimes in conflict. White America courted and cultivated Harlem’s subculture. White patrons gave encouragement and funding to black talent,

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sometimes serving as guides and judges as well, and provided scholarships, grants, and outlets for black artists, particularly for writers. This dependency of black artists could, at times, subvert black sensibilities and interests—for patrons might have their own agendas. Major publishing companies accepted and sought out black talent. None of the black writers’ works became best-sellers, but they sold enough copies to warrant continued support by white publishers and critics. Though discrimination in the publishing industry was not entirely eliminated, post-1920’s black writers found doors more open than had earlier generations. Whether younger black writers admired or rejected the works of the Harlem Renaissance, they could not ignore them. Such writers as Zora Neale Hurston, Richard Wright, and James Baldwin would carve out careers different from, yet building on, those of the giants of the 1920’s. Reacting to the older writers, the new generation was stimulated to examine life for African Americans as it was and as it could be. International Repercussions The Harlem Renaissance reached beyond America. Peter Abrahams, a black South African writer, first read American black literature in a library in Johannesburg. He was enthralled by the poems, stories, and essays he found, and acknowledged the effect of such literature on his life by stating: “I became a nationalist, a colour nationalist, through the writings of men and women who lived a world away from me. To them I owe a great debt for crystallizing my vague yearnings to write and for showing me the long dream was attainable.” Abrahams spoke for many Africans and black West Indians eager to know that white people did not have a monopoly on the writing of real literature. Whites did not have a monopoly on composing and playing music. Black music influenced American culture even more strongly than black literature. Black music—spirituals, ragtime, and particularly jazz—intrigued white arrangers and composers. White pioneers in jazz such as Bix Beiderbecke, Jack Teagarden, Gene Krupa, and Benny Goodman studied jazz intently, often spending long hours in cabarets listening to black masters. At

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first merely imitative, these white musicians would go on to rival their teachers and then to dominate commercial jazz. European musicians also became enamored of jazz. Among them, the composers Darius Milhaud and Kurt Weill helped pioneer continental classical jazz. (A wave of enthusiasm for Ellington and Armstrong’s “hot” jazz swept Europe later.) Referring to classical jazz, Leopold Stowkowski said of the black musicians of America that “they are causing new blood to flow in the veins of music . . . they are path finders into new realms.” This tribute was seconded by such great composers as Maurice Ravel and Igor Stravinsky, who acknowledged the strong links between jazz and much other modern music. Legacy Jazz helped to interpret the spirit of the times, bringing joy and vigor to the post-World War I world. Along with it came popular dances such as the Turkey Trot, the Black Bottom, and the Lindy Hop. Talented black dancers and singers enabled this music to conquer a broad public and to be recognized as art. Although older than jazz, blues music began as mostly a fad for white composers and audiences. The blues , however, later became a craze in 1920’s Harlem as an expression of black lives. Much of the popularity stemmed from singers such as Bessie Smith and, earlier, Ma Rainey. Blues songs mingled hope and realism with a weary determination; they were songs of the black masses struggling to be accepted for who they were. Langston Hughes saw the blues as distinctly black, helping to free African Americans from American standardization. Many of his poems, such as “The Weary Blues,” reflect the influence of the blues and use the music’s structures, themes, and imagery. Later, younger writers such as Ralph Ellison and James Baldwin used the blues both to express sadness and also as a source of strength. An alternating expression of despair and hope, the blues were also sometimes a protest of societal conditions. Although its artists produced important works of literature and music, the Harlem Renaissance proved above all to be important for its race-consciousness, for a new sense that black people had a rich culture. To a degree, though, the Harlem Renaissance

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left a paradoxical gift: the lesson of its failures. Writers such as Countée Cullen and Claude McKay were not as innovative or as fresh as they could have been; they were tied too closely to white norms of art and culture to be true innovators. Heavily dependent on white patrons for approval, many black artists lacked a truly personal vision. The Harlem Renaissance died in the mid-1930’s, mortally wounded by both the Depression and the disillusionment of black artists who failed to find a common ideology to bind them together. Still, the Harlem Renaissance served as a symbol and a reference point. It was a stepping-stone for black writers and artists who followed, more sophisticated and cynical but proclaiming loudly and clearly that African Americans must be free to be themselves. S. Carol Berg Further Reading Bontemps, Arna. The Harlem Renaissance Remembered. New York: Dodd, Mead, 1972. An excellent set of essays on leading figures of the Harlem Renaissance. Chapter 2 is particularly useful as an overview. Notes, a bibliography, and an index. Butcher, Margaret J. The Negro in American Culture. 2d ed. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1972. A cultural history of blacks throughout American history. Traces folk and formal contributions of American blacks to American culture as a whole in historical sequence and topical fashion. No bibliography; index. Davis, Arthur P. From the Dark Tower. Washington, D.C.: Howard University Press, 1974. Covers major black writers from 1900 to 1960. Divided into two long sections: “The New Negro Renaissance” (1900-1940) and “In the Mainstream” (1940-1960). Gives biographical details and selective bibliography for each author. Extensive quotes from authors’ works. Photos of each author. Index. Floyd, Samuel A. Black Music in the Harlem Renaissance. New York: Greenwood Press, 1990. Excellent collection of essays covering varied types of music and major black musicians. One essay on Harlem Renaissance activities in England. Many illustrations of musical works. Notes and references for each chapter. A superb bibliography, listing major composers and their works. Index.

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Fullinwider, S. P. The Mind and Mood of Black America. Homewood, Ill.: Dorsey Press, 1969. A study of black myths and of the Harlem Renaissance revolt against these myths. Includes a look at several key figures of the Harlem Renaissance. Covers the 1880’s to the 1960’s. Chapters 2 and 6 are particularly helpful. Brief bibliography and an index. Hutchinson, George. The Harlem Renaissance in Black and White. Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1995. A valuable addition to the literature on the Harlem Renaissance. Huggins, Nathan I. Harlem Renaissance. New York: Oxford University Press, 1971. An analysis of several black artists and their works within the context of American cultural history. Questions and challenges the quality of African American artistic expressions. Photographs, notes, and bibliography for each chapter. An extensive index. Lewis, David L. When Harlem Was in Vogue. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1981. An intellectual and social history covering many aspects of 1920’s Harlem. Primary focus on written and musical events. Lavishly illustrated. A bibliography for each chapter and an index. Shaw, Arnold. Black Popular Music in America. New York: Schirmer Books, 1986. A chronological study of black popular music from spirituals to funk. Shaw relates the debt of American popular music to black artists and songwriters and adds a “White Synthesis” to each chapter. Chapters 3, 5, and 7 are particularly helpful. Illustrated; a bibliography and discography are included for each chapter. Index. Wintz, Cary D. Black Culture and the Harlem Renaissance. Houston, Tex.: Rice University Press, 1988. Examines the Harlem Renaissance as a social and intellectual movement within the framework of black social and intellectual history. Relates the Harlem Renaissance to earlier black literature and its new urban setting. Ties black writers to the larger literary community. Helpful figures and tables. Bibliography for each chapter; index. See also Anderson’s Lincoln Memorial concert; Film history; Great Migration; Literature; Music

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Harlins murder The Event: Fatal shooting of a fifteen-year-old African American girl by a Korean business owner Date: March 16, 1991 Place: Los Angeles, California The verdict in this case angered African Americans in Los Angeles and made Korean businesses primary targets for theft and vandalism by African Americans. After a dispute over a $1.79 bottle of orange juice, fifteen-year-old Latasha Harlins was shot and killed at the Empire Liquor Market Deli in South Central Los Angeles on March 16, 1991. A security camera recorded the African American teenager being shot in the back of the head by the market owner. The merchant, Soon Ja Du, a forty-nine-year-old Korean woman, was charged with murder. Because the shooting occurred only thirteen days after African American Rodney King was beaten by Los Angeles police, it aggravated racial and ethnic tensions in Los Angeles. On March 26, 1991, Ja Du was found guilty of voluntary manslaughter, but Judge Karlan granted the defendant probation. This decision angered African Americans in Los Angeles and made Korean businesses primary targets for theft and vandalism by African Americans. In addition, the decision escalated the number of conflicts between African American and Asian youth in Los Angeles. Bitter feelings generated by the Harlins and Rodney King verdicts were unleashed during the Los Angeles riots of 1992. Alvin K. Benson Further Reading Kim, Kwang Chung, ed. Koreans in the Hood: Conflict with African Americans. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999. Min, Pyong Gap. Caught in the Middle: Korean Merchants in America’s Multiethnic Cities. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996. See also Civil rights worker murders; King beating case; Koreans and African Americans; Los Angeles riots

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Harper v. Virginia Board of Elections The Case: U.S. Supreme Court ruling on voting rights Date: March 24, 1966 In this ruling, the Supreme Court banned poll taxes in state elections in the United States. Poll taxes, or the payment of fees for the privilege of voting, were widely used in southern states as a means to restrict the electorate, and in particular black voters. Because poll taxes led to corruption—as candidates and political organizations would pay the taxes of their supporters—and because there were more effective ways of eliminating black voters, many southern states started to repeal their poll taxes. Opposition to the poll tax was led by the National Committee to Abolish the Poll Tax and the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). On five occasions the House of Representatives passed legislation to ban the tax, but southern senators filibustered, blocking passage in the Senate. In 1964, the Twenty-fourth Amendment to the Constitution was ratified, eliminating the use of poll taxes in federal elections. Five states—Alabama, Arkansas, Mississippi, Texas, and Virginia—continued to use poll taxes in state and local elections. Arkansas dropped its poll tax in 1964 after the passage of the Twenty-fourth Amendment. In 1965 the U.S. House of Representatives passed a poll tax ban in state elections as part of the Voting Rights Act of 1965. The Senate failed to support the ban, however, and the final version of the Voting Rights Act merely stated that the poll tax “denied or abridged” the constitutional right to vote. Black residents of Virginia brought suit against that state’s $1.50 annual poll tax as a requirement for voting in state and local elections. The U.S. district court, citing the 1937 case Breedlove v. Suttles, dismissed the claim. In Breedlove, the U.S. Supreme Court had held that, except where constrained by the Constitution, the states may impose whatever conditions on suffrage that they deem appropriate. On appeal, a 6-3 majority in the Supreme Court overruled Breedlove and held that the payment of a fee in order to vote violated the Constitution.

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Interestingly, although the plaintiffs were black, the ruling was based on economic discrimination rather than racial discrimination. “To introduce wealth or payment of a fee as a measure of a voter’s qualifications,” wrote Justice William Douglas in the majority opinion, “is to introduce a capricious or irrelevant factor.” In the view of the Court’s majority, voter qualifications had no relationship to wealth. The three dissenters believed that a “fairly applied” poll tax could be a reasonable basis for the right to vote. The Harper decision actually had little direct impact. Since only four states used poll taxes as a condition for voting at the time of the Harper decision, the ban on poll taxes barely generated a ripple on the surface of American politics. Darryl Paulson See also Poll taxes; Voting Rights Act of 1965; Voting Rights Act of 1975

Harpers Ferry raid The Event: Attempt by militant abolitionists to liberate and arm Virginia slaves Date: October 16-18, 1859 Place: Harpers Ferry, Virginia (now West Virginia) John Brown’s raid on the federal arsenal at Harpers Ferry intensified the sectional bitterness that led to the Civil War. John Brown’s abortive raid on the federal arsenal at Harpers Ferry, Virginia (now West Virginia), on October 16-18, 1859, stands out as a critical episode in the spiraling sequence of events that led northerners and southerners into the Civil War in 1861. Brown, long a militant abolitionist, emigrated to Kansas Territory in 1855 with five of his sons to participate in the struggle between proslavery and Free State forces for control of the territory. Their insurrection was in the same spirit as earlier violence perpetrated by abolitionist, Free State militias such as the Border Ruffians following election of a proslavery, territorial legislature in 1854. With a small band of Free State men, Brown helped initiate civil

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war in Kansas by murdering five allegedly proslavery settlers along Pottawatomie Creek, in May, 1856. Historians would later dub this era “Bleeding Kansas.” Brown’s Plan Brown’s experience in the Kansas civil war convinced him that a conspiracy existed to seize the national territories for slavery. Having long since lost faith in combating slavery by peaceful means, Brown vowed to strike a violent blow at the heart of slavery. An intense Calvinist, Brown had come to believe that he was God’s personal instrument to eradicate the inhuman institution. As early as 1857, he had decided to seize a mountain fortress in Virginia with a small guerrilla force and incite a bloody slave rebellion that would overthrow the slave powers throughout the South. To that end, Brown sought funds and arms from abolitionists in the North. Under the guise of seeking money to continue the Free State fight in Kansas, Brown secured the friendship and financial aid of the Massachusetts State Kansas Committee— a group dedicated to helping the Free-Soil forces in Kansas and elsewhere. The resolute and persuasive Brown won the support of six prominent antislavery figures, who agreed to form a secret Committee of Six to advise him and raise money for his stillsecret mission. The Secret Six consisted of a well-educated group of dedicated abolitionists and reformers: Franklin B. Sanborn, a young Concord schoolteacher and secretary of the Massachusetts State Kansas Committee; Thomas Wentworth Higginson, a “disunion abolitionist” and outspoken Unitarian minister; Theodore Parker, a controversial theologian-preacher; Samuel Gridley Howe, a prominent physician and educator; George Luther Stearns, a prosperous merchant and chairman of the Massachusetts State Kansas Committee; and Gerrit Smith, a wealthy New York landowner and reformer. Throughout the remainder of 1857, the indefatigable Brown trained a small group of adventurers and militant abolitionists in preparation for his mission. In May, 1858, Brown moved on to Chatham, Canada, holding a secret “constitutional convention” attended by thirty-four African Americans and twelve whites.

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There, he outlined his plans to invade Virginia, liberate and arm the slaves, defeat any military force brought against them, organize the African Americans into a government, and force the southern states to concede emancipation. Under Brown’s leadership, the convention approved a constitution for a new state once the slaves were freed and elected Brown commander in chief with John Kagi, his chief lieutenant, as secretary of war. Brown’s proposed invasion was delayed in 1858, when a disgruntled follower partially betrayed the plans to several prominent politicians. The exposé so frightened the Secret Six that they urged Brown to return to Kansas and create a diversionary operation until rumors of the Virginia plan dissipated. Brown also agreed not to inform the Secret Six of the details of his plans, so that they could not be held responsible in case the invasion failed. In December, 1858, Brown conducted the diversion as planned, by leading a raid into Missouri, liberating eleven slaves, and es-

Imaginative depiction of John Brown’s raid, in a mural painted in the Topeka, Kansas, state capitol by John Stuart Curry during the late 1930’s. (National Archives)

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corting them to Canada. He then began final preparations for the invasion of Virginia. The Raid Harpers Ferry, situated at the confluence of the Potomac and Shenandoah Rivers in northern Virginia, was the initial target in Brown’s plan, because he needed weapons from the federal arsenal there to arm the liberated slaves. Brown and three of his men arrived at Harpers Ferry on July 3, 1859, and set up headquarters at the Kennedy farm, seven miles east of Harpers Ferry in Maryland. The rest of Brown’s twenty-one young recruits (sixteen whites and five African Americans) slowly trickled in. On the night of October 16, 1859, after several months of refining his plans, Brown led eighteen of his followers in an assault on the arsenal and rifle works at Harpers Ferry. They quickly captured the arsenal, the armory, and a nearby rifle works, and then seized hostages from the townspeople and surrounding countryside. Fearing a slave insurrection, the armed townspeople gathered in the streets, and church bells tolled the alarm over the countryside. Brown stood his ground, anxiously waiting for the slaves from the countryside to rally to his cause. By 11:00 a.m. the next day, Brown’s men—holed up in the small fire-enginehouse of the armory—engaged in a pitched battle with the assembled townspeople, farmers, and militia. By dawn the following morning, a company of horse Marines under the command of Colonel Robert E. Lee took up positions in front of the armory. When Brown refused Lee’s summons to surrender unconditionally, the Marines stormed the armory, wounded Brown, and routed his followers. Seventeen people died in the raid; ten of the dead, including two of Brown’s sons, were raiders. Five raiders were captured, two were taken prisoner several days later, but five escaped without a trace. The Consequences Governor Henry A. Wise of Virginia decided that Brown and his coconspirators should be tried in Virginia rather than by federal authorities, even though their attack had been against federal

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property. Brown and the captured raiders stood trial at Charles Town, Virginia; on October 31, the jury found them guilty of inciting a slave rebellion, murder, and treason against the state of Virginia. After the trial, in a final attempt to save his life, Brown’s lawyers collected affidavits from many of his friends and relatives alleging that Brown suffered from hereditary insanity and monomania. Brown rejected his defense, claiming that he was sane. He knew that he could better serve the abolitionist cause as a martyr, a sentiment shared by northern abolitionists. Governor Wise agreed that Brown was sane, and on December 2, 1859, John Brown was hanged at Charles Town. Six of his fellow conspirators met a similar fate. Brown’s raid intensified the sectional bitterness that led to the Civil War. Although the vast majority of northerners condemned the incident as the work of a fanatic, the outraged South, racked by rumors of a slave insurrection, suspected all northerners of abetting Brown’s crime. Republican denials of any link with Brown were of little avail. Northern abolitionists, including the Secret Six, who had been cleared of complicity, gathered by the hundreds throughout the North to honor and acclaim Brown’s martyrdom. The South was in no mood to distinguish between the northern Republicans who wanted to contain slavery and the small group of abolitionists who sought to destroy the institution. The South withdrew even further into a defense of its peculiar institution, stifled internal criticism, and intensified its hatred and suspicion of the “Black Republican” Party. In 1861, northerners marched to war to the tune of “John Brown’s Body”—fulfilling Brown’s prophecy that “the crimes of this guilty land will never be purged away; but with Blood.” Terry L. Seip Updated by Richard Whitworth Further Reading John Brown, Abolitionist: The Man who Killed Slavery, Sparked the Civil War, and Seeded Civil Rights (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2005) by David S. Reynolds is an authoritative biography of Brown. Richard O. Boyer’s The Legend of John Brown: A Biography and a History (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1972) covers not only

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the events but also the temper of the era that culminated in the Civil War. Stephen B. Oates’s Our Fiery Trial: Abraham Lincoln, John Brown, and the Civil War Era (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1979) shows how Lincoln, Brown, and Nat Turner were interconnected in the events that hurled the United States toward civil war. Oates’s To Purge This Land with Blood: A Biography of John Brown (2d ed., Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1984) is an evenhanded account of Brown and the events he precipitated. Blacks on John Brown (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1972), compiled by Benjamin Quarles, includes selections by Frederick Douglass, W. E. B. Du Bois, Countee Cullen, and Langston Hughes. Edward J. Renehan’s The Secret Six: The True Tale of the Men Who Conspired with John Brown (New York: Crown, 1995) details the lives of the six unlikely revolutionaries—five aristocratic Bostonians and one moneyed New Yorker—who financed John Brown’s bloody raid. See also Abolition; Bleeding Kansas; Civil War; Compromise of 1850; Kansas-Nebraska Act; Missouri Compromise; Turner’s slave insurrection

Hawkins murder The Event: Killing of a sixteen-year-old African American boy by young Italian Americans Date: August 23, 1989 Place: Brooklyn, New York The Yusuf Hawkins murder was racially motivated and the tragedy came to symbolize racial divisions that lay under the surface of New York City. Yusuf Hawkins, a sixteen-year-old African American, was confronted and killed by a group of Italian American young men in the predominantly white Bensonhurst section of Brooklyn, New York, on August 23, 1989. His murder was clearly racially motivated and served as a sign of the deep-seated animosities and racial divisions that existed in New York City.

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Hawkins and three African American friends had traveled to Bensonhurst from their home in East New York to look at a used car for sale. They were confronted by a group of white youths with baseball bats led by Keith Mondello, Joseph Fama, and others. Hawkins was trapped by the group when four shots from a .32-caliber automatic pistol were fired. Hawkins was hit once in the hand and twice in the chest and died shortly after. Police reported that the white youths mistakenly believed that Hawkins and his companions were friends of a white neighborhood girl, Gina Feliciano. Feliciano, who once dated Mondello, had reportedly begun a series of friendships with African American and Hispanic men. The night that Hawkins was killed, Mondello was reportedly told either by Feliciano or someone else that a group of her black and Hispanic friends would arrive with bats to beat up him and his friends. Eight men were charged in the attack. The eighteen-yearold Fama was the only one convicted of second-degree murder and sentenced to the maximum sentence on June 11, 1990. The nineteen-year-old Mondello was convicted of riot, unlawful imprisonment, discrimination, menacing, and criminal possession of a weapon and sentenced on June 11, 1990, to five and one-third to sixteen years in prison. Joseph Serrano, John Vento, and Pasquale Raucci were convicted on lesser charges. Three others were acquitted of all charges. Erica Childs See also Civil rights worker murders; Crown Heights conflicts

Heart of Atlanta Motel v. United States The Case: U.S. Supreme Court ruling on segregation in public accommodations Date: December 14, 1964 In this ruling the U.S. Supreme Court endorsed laws forbidding private discrimination by hotels, restaurants, and other places of public accommodation in this case.

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The Fourteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution was enacted in 1868 to provide protection for the newly freed slaves. After the Civil War, Congress passed several broad statutes aimed at protecting African Americans against racial discrimination in housing and contracts. These laws were needed because, although they were freed from slavery, African Americans still suffered from severe discrimination in all aspects of American life. The Supreme Court took a narrow view of congressional power in 1883, however, and issued a decision that prevented Congress from attempting to stop private individuals and companies from engaging in racial discrimination. The Supreme Court said that Congress could enact laws aimed only at governmental discrimination. In effect, the Supreme Court declared that African Americans could be victims of blatant discrimination by private entities without any interference from the law. As a result, many African Americans’ lives changed little from their experience as slaves. They were still forced to work as agricultural laborers because they were not permitted to be trained and hired for other jobs. The Legacy of Segregation Because no federal laws could prevent private discrimination, until 1964 African Americans were deprived of many opportunities readily enjoyed by white people. If they wished to travel, black people frequently could not find motels that would accept them or restaurants that would serve them. African Americans were forced to carry their own food if they went on bus trips and often had to knock on doors in black neighborhoods in order to find families that would put them up for the night in private homes. For example, when professional baseball teams had spring training in Florida every year, the white players stayed in hotels while their black teammates rented rooms in the homes of local black families. Similar circumstances arose when northern college sports teams traveled to the South for games. Racial segregation and discrimination were so severe that bus stations had separate waiting rooms, rest rooms, and drinking fountains for black passengers. In many cities, black and white friends could dine to-

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gether only in black-owned restaurants because African Americans were not allowed to eat in white-owned establishments. In sum, it was very difficult for African Americans to travel and shop because they were denied access to so many business establishments. Beginning in the 1940’s, members of Congress made repeated attempts to enact antidiscrimination legislation. The structure of Congress, however, gave members power according to seniority. Because southerners had the most seniority, they controlled many of the legislative committees. Thus, by keeping bills tied up in committee hearings, they could prevent Congress from considering proposed legislation. Southern congresspeople were very successful in ensuring that only weak civil rights laws, if any, were enacted by Congress. Beginning in the 1940’s and 1950’s, many African Americans organized boycotts, marches, and other protests to challenge racial discrimination. Peaceful protesters were often met by violent mobs of whites or were attacked, beaten, and arrested by allwhite police forces. Shortly after highly publicized demonstrations against racial discrimination in Alabama during May, 1963, President John F. Kennedy decided to send a major civil rights bill to Congress. The Civil Rights Act of 1964 Title II of the proposed legislation that eventually became the Civil Rights Act of 1964 prohibited private discrimination in places of public accommodation, including hotels, motels, restaurants, and theaters. President Kennedy was assassinated in November, 1963, while the bill was working its way through Congress. Upon succeeding to the presidency, Lyndon Johnson made the civil rights bill his major legislative priority. Within days of Kennedy’s assassination, President Johnson asked a joint session of Congress to enact the Civil Rights Act as a memorial to the late President Kennedy. When the Senate held hearings to consider the proposed legislation, questions arose concerning congressional power to outlaw private discrimination. The Supreme Court had clearly stated in 1883 that Congress lacked such power under the Fourteenth

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The Supreme Court’s Heart of Atlanta Motel decision turned back the first major challenge to the Civil Rights Act of 1964, ensuring there would be no return to legally protected racial segregation in public accommodations such as movie theaters. (Library of Congress)

Amendment. Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy testified that Congress possessed the power to outlaw discrimination in public accommodations through its constitutional authority to regulate interstate commerce. Kennedy and his assistants argued that racial discrimination in public accommodations hampered the national economy because it prevented African Americans from traveling freely. Moreover, it deterred northern companies from expanding into the South because they did not wish to subject their black employees to severe discrimination. Senator Strom Thurmond of South Carolina, one of the consistent opponents of civil rights legislation, questioned Attorney General Kennedy closely. From the repeated questioning, it was clear that the Civil Rights Act’s supporters were not completely certain about precisely which private businesses would be prevented from discriminating under the law. Although a national bus company could clearly be regulated under congres-

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sional power over interstate commerce, it was not clear whether establishments such as neighborhood diners and barbershops were subject to federal laws governing commerce. If these small businesses were involved only in the local economy and did not affect interstate commerce, then Congress presumably would be unable to prevent them from engaging in racial discrimination. The Supreme Court Intervenes When the Civil Rights Act was enacted in 1964, it was immediately challenged by southern businesses that wished to continue engaging in racial discrimination. The Heart of Atlanta Motel claimed that it was not engaged in interstate commerce because it provided services at one location inside Georgia. The motel wished to continue its practice of refusing to rent rooms to black customers, so it filed a legal action seeking to have federal judges declare that the Civil Rights Act was invalid. Although it usually takes several years for cases to work their way through the judicial system in order to reach the Supreme Court, the high court took up the issue of discrimination in public accommodations without delay in late 1964. In opposition to the motel’s arguments, Archibald Cox, the solicitor general of the United States, argued to the Supreme Court that congressional power to regulate interstate commerce should be construed broadly to cover all businesses which affect commerce in any way. Even if a business appeared to be limited to local customers, Cox argued that it would have links to interstate commerce. For example, a neighborhood barbershop’s equipment inevitably includes a chair, a pair of scissors, or other equipment that was manufactured in another state. On December 14, 1964, only two months after hearing oral arguments, the Supreme Court issued a unanimous decision that endorsed congressional power to outlaw private discrimination in public accommodations. The Court’s opinion in Heart of Atlanta Motel, Inc. v. United States, written by Justice Tom C. Clark, acknowledged that racial discrimination had prevented African Americans from enjoying their right to travel. Because the Heart of Atlanta Motel served many travelers from outside Georgia, it

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was found to affect interstate commerce and therefore to come under the antidiscrimination laws. In this and other decisions concerning Title II of the Civil Rights Act, the Supreme Court interpreted congressional power to regulate interstate commerce so broadly that virtually every private business, no matter how localized in nature, was barred from engaging in racial discrimination. Scholars argue that the Court dispensed with legal arguments concerning technical limitations on congressional power because the justices were committed to endorsing all governmental efforts to combat racial discrimination. Impact of the Court’s Decision After the Supreme Court’s decision in Heart of Atlanta Motel, the United States Department of Justice initiated hundreds of investigations into racial discrimination complaints concerning places of public accommodation. The Court’s decision clearly confirmed the federal government’s authority to prosecute businesses that failed to end discriminatory practices. Through the combined efforts of Congress, the president, and the Supreme Court, African Americans could finally enjoy access to theaters, motels, and restaurants. The deeply entrenched practices of racial discrimination had been dealt a powerful blow by the federal government. As a result, black people who traveled could find motels and restaurants that would serve them. Many proprietors of public accommodations businesses initially resisted implementation of the antidiscrimination law by declining to serve African Americans or by being rude to black customers. Over time, however, the American public, including business owners in the South, accepted the idea that all people should have equal access to public accommodations. Only a tiny number of businesses were so opposed to desegregation that they turned themselves into private clubs in order to avoid having to conform to the terms of the Civil Rights Act. Title II of the Civil Rights Act of l964 is regarded as one of the most effective civil rights laws ever enacted. Unlike laws concerning employment, in which there are controversies concerning proof of discrimination, Title II addresses a very straight-forward subject. In the employment context, there might be many legally

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acceptable reasons why a particular individual did not receive a particular job. Thus, a minority applicant may find it difficult to discover whether illegal racial discrimination played a role in the hiring decision. In public accommodations, the question is much simpler. Were the customers provided with the services that they requested and for which they were willing to pay? Because discrimination in public accommodations, unlike that in employment, is very difficult to disguise, businesses throughout the United States have generally eliminated any vestiges of the formal discrimination that was previously so prevalent. In fact, proprietors of restaurants and other places of public accommodation have discovered that it is good for their businesses to seek African American customers. Previously, they not only deprived black people of services and the ability to travel but also deprived themselves of customers in a growing segment of the American population. Eventually, racial discrimination in public accommodations was pushed so firmly into the past that many establishments owned or controlled by whites developed advertising campaigns aimed specifically at black consumers. The Supreme Court’s decision in the Heart of Atlanta Motel case indicated that all three branches of the federal government were committed to dismantling racial discrimination and segregation. The message sent by this decision not only warned segregationist interests that their power had been diminished but also helped to mobilize and encourage civil rights supporters to pursue actively additional antidiscrimination statutes and favorable judicial decisions in areas such as housing and voting. Christopher E. Smith Further Reading Abraham, Henry J. Freedom and the Court: Civil Rights and Liberties in the United States. 5th ed. New York: Oxford University Press, 1988. Thorough review of the Supreme Court’s cases interpreting the Bill of Rights and the Fourteenth Amendment. Contains good coverage of the cases and legal issues concerning the interpretation of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Cox, Archibald. The Warren Court: Constitutional Decision as an Instrument of Reform. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University

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Press, 1968. Discussion of how the Supreme Court’s decisions affect social issues. Contains commentary about the design of particular arguments presented to the Supreme Court in the Heart of Atlanta Motel case by the lawyer who presented those arguments. Griffin, John Howard. Black Like Me. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1961. First-person account by a white writer who had his skin medically darkened in order to travel throughout the South in 1959 as a black man. Describes the discrimination and harassment that faced blacks prior to passage of the Civil Rights Act. Loevy, Robert D. “’To Write It in the Books of Law’: President Lyndon B. Johnson and the Civil Rights Act of 1964.” In Lyndon Baines Johnson and the Uses of Power, edited by Bernard J. Firestone and Robert C. Vogt. New York: Greenwood Press, 1988. Detailed account of the events leading to the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Provides insights into the role played by President Johnson in pushing the legislation past opponents in Congress. Nieman, Donald G. Promises to Keep: African-Americans and the Constitutional Order, 1776 to the Present. New York: Oxford University Press, 1991. Discussion of racial discrimination in the United States. Provides a thorough history of the ways in which courts and other government institutions failed to provide blacks with the rights guaranteed by the Constitution. See also Katzenbach v. McClung; Segregation; Shelley v. Kraemer

“I Have a Dream” speech The Event: Speech delivered by Martin Luther King, Jr. during the March on Washington Date: August 28, 1963 Place: Washington, D.C. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s speech called for a color-blind society, identifying a new American Dream for race relations. The spring and summer of 1963 proved to be one of the most important times of the Civil Rights movement. On June 12, Medgar

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Evers was assassinated; white supremacist Byron de la Beckwith would not be found guilty of his murder for nearly thirty years. In April, 1963, protest against discrimination in the downtown department stores of Birmingham, Alabama, culminated in protests on April 4. King’s arrest during these demonstrations and the media coverage of police violence against the demonstrators catapulted both the movement and King, the leader of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), into the national spotlight to an even greater degree than before. The boycotts and mass marches eventually provided sufficient pressure that white leaders promised to desegregate the stores’ facilities, hire African Americans to work in the stores, and establish a biracial committee for ongoing talks concerning racial problems. These gains were achieved at a price, however: King was jailed briefly; police brutality occurred against protesters; and arrested protesters filled Birmingham’s jails. Nevertheless, the filled jails negatively affected the capacity of police to arrest and hold demonstrators, which was exactly what King and other civil rights leaders had hoped; news coverage of police brutality outraged many citizens; and, while jailed, King wrote his “Letter from Birmingham Jail,” a document that delineated the need for and goals of the direct action campaigns of the Civil Rights movement. The acclaim that met this document foreshadowed the reaction to his speech at the March on Washington two months later. March on Washington The purpose of the March on Washington (sometimes called the Poor People’s March) was not merely to make an emotional plea on behalf of African Americans; its primary purpose was to expose the American public to the economic basis of racial inequality. Thus, the focus of the march was the need to increase jobs and economic opportunities for African Americans, in order for them to realize racial equality. These especially were the goals of the leaders of the March on Washington, A. Philip Randolph, labor leader and organizer of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, and civil rights activist Bayard Rustin, one of the earliest planners of the event. In fact, the full title of the event was “The March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom.” The march, there-

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Martin Luther King, Jr., delivering his “I Have a Dream” speech on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial. (Library of Congress)

fore, had a set of important goals: more jobs, a higher minimum wage, support for President John F. Kennedy’s antidiscrimination legislation, and arousing the conscience of the United States to the plight of African Americans. King’s speech was especially important on this last point, for the “I Have a Dream” section of the speech was an eloquent plea for a society based on racial harmony. Nevertheless, while King’s speech is best remembered for his vision of racial equality, its true import lies in the fact that the renown accorded the speech helped advance the multifaceted goals of the march, thus helping to pave the way for the Civil Rights Act of 1964. King’s Vision The passage in which King reiterates “I have a dream” should be understood in the overall context of the speech. Although King started by reading from his prepared text, he disregarded this text about halfway through the speech and incorporated a theme he

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had used in some previous speeches: “I have a dream.” This theme introduced into the speech two of the main tenets of the SCLC: interracial cooperation and social equality. King’s eloquent vision of a future without racial divisions captured the emotions of many viewers and, later, readers of the speech. In fact, the emotional power of that section of King’s remarks sometimes blurs the memory of other, equally important aspects of his speech. King’s speech has become widely known as a masterpiece of rhetoric and argumentation. One rhetorical device that King used to great effect is repetition. The most obvious example is the repetition of the phrase “I have a dream” to detail different aspects of King’s vision of racial harmony, but there are other, equally important examples. In the opening section of the speech, King reiterated the phrase “one hundred years later” to emphasize that one hundred years after the Emancipation Proclamation (issued in 1863), African Americans still had not achieved equality. Immediately after the “I have a dream” section, King repeated the phrase that it is “with this faith” in his dream that he and other people could hope to transform American society. These examples demonstrate King’s consciousness of the use of rhetoric to produce emotional impact. Perhaps one of the most important rhetorical strategies of King’s speech is his reference to the principles voiced by the nation’s Founders in his appeal for racial equality. This strategy was especially important in light of the fact that the government (including the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the Justice Department) was concerned that the Civil Rights movement might discredit the United States abroad. Hence, it was perceptive of King to imply in the speech that he was not undermining the United States but asking the country to do justice to the principles that were asserted to be the bedrock of the U.S. political and societal character. King stated, for example, that his dream was “deeply rooted in the American dream,” and that he dreamed of a day when Americans “will be able to sing with new meaning ‘My country ‘tis of thee, sweet land of liberty, of thee I sing.’” King then immediately used the words of that song to delineate the different areas of the country where he hoped the United States would soon “let freedom ring” for all its citizens.

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King alluded to the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution as being a “promissory note” to all citizens, which those at the march now were claiming as their inheritance. The speech gained power from King’s stressing that he was asking the United States to live up to its principles and thus to fulfill the greatness of its pronounced creed. King’s speech became not only one of the most publicized events of the Civil Rights movement but also one of the most highly regarded speeches in U.S. history. Although much of the acclaim rests on the emotionally powerful “I have a dream” section of the speech, the entire speech is a masterpiece of rhetoric and argument. One of the most essential aspects of the speech was at the end, when King stated that on the day “when we let freedom ring” the United States will only be speeding up the day—not arriving at it—when “all of God’s children, black men and white men, Jews and Gentiles, Protestants and Catholics, will be able to join hands and sing in the words of the old Negro spiritual, ‘Free at last! Free at last! Thank God Almighty, we are free at last!’” This stands as the lingering, haunting challenge of Martin Luther King’s speech at the March on Washington. Jane Davis Further Reading Drew D. Hansen’s The Dream: Martin Luther King, Jr., and the Speech that Inspired a Nation (New York: Ecco, 2003) provides a fascinating analysis of King’s famous speech. James Baldwin’s “The Dangerous Road Before Martin Luther King,” in The Price of the Ticket (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1985) offers a detailed consideration of the difficulties facing King. David J. Garrow’s Bearing the Cross: Martin Luther King, Jr., and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (New York: Vintage Books, 1986) examines the strategies of civil rights protests and conflicts between various civil rights groups. Penelope McPhee and Flip Schulke’s King Remembered (New York: Pocket Books, 1986) is a concise introductory biography of King that focuses on his philosophy as a leader of a nonviolent movement.

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See also Civil Rights Act of 1960; Civil Rights Act of 1964; Civil Rights movement; King assassination; Little Rock school desegregation crisis; Montgomery bus boycott; Southern Christian Leadership Conference; Watts riot

Integration Definition: Process of permitting the intermixing of different racial and ethnic groups Crucial changes in U.S. public policy beginning in the 1940’s helped promote the goal of racial integration. However, many social and economic factors acted to slow or prevent the complete intermingling of races. A racially integrated society would be one in which African Americans and other racial or ethnic groups could participate in all aspects of national life without being handicapped by their color. In such a society, there should be no neighborhood where an African American could not reside simply because of being black; no hotel, restaurant, or other public facility that an African American could not use on equal terms with whites; no school that an African American child could not attend because of being black; no kind of vocational training, university education, or line of work from which an African American would be barred because of being black; and no public office for which an African American could not contend. In an integrated society, whites would see African Americans not as pariahs but as fellow Americans, fellow veterans, coworkers, and neighbors. This goal of a racially integrated society, despite much progress, is only half achieved; the role that public policy should play in creating a more racially integrated society remains a matter of lively debate. Those who discuss the ethics of integration are dealing with the ethics of public policy rather than (as is the case, to some extent, with prejudice and racism) the morality of private behavior. The promotion of racial integration has been seen by its proponents as essential to the realization of an important

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value in public policy ethics: that of equality under the law regardless of race or color. This principle was publicly recognized in the United States by the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution (ratified in 1868), which mandated that every state guarantee its citizens the equal protection of the laws. Nevertheless, de facto segregation reigned for nearly three-quarters of a century before significant steps were taken to break down racial barriers. Milestones in Integration, 1945-1968 Signposts of progress during these years (which witnessed the flowering of the Civil Rights movement) included the gradual desegregation of the American military, which began with President Harry S. Truman’s Executive Order 9981 in 1948; the Supreme Court decision of 1954, that struck down the constitutionality of segregated schools; the admission of African Americans into southern state universities; the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which established the right of equal access to public accommodations and banned discrimination in employment; the Voting Rights Act of 1965; the Supreme Court decision of 1967 that overturned state laws against black-white intermarriage; and the federal Fair Housing Act of 1968. By 1990, many of these changes had achieved general acceptance; efforts to integrate employment, schools, and housing, however, continued to arouse controversy. The Affirmative Action Controversy By the late 1970’s, affirmative action, in which the presence or absence of a fixed percentage of African Americans in a business, government department, or university is used to determine whether that institution discriminates, had become the chief tool by which the federal government tried to open up opportunities for African Americans. In 1975, in the book Affirmative Discrimination, the white sociologist Nathan Glazer condemned the application of this policy in both private businesses and government employment. Glazer argued that affirmative action undermines respect for merit and encourages ethnic and racial divisiveness; unlike many liberals, he denied that the underrepresentation of

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African Americans in a particular job or profession is necessarily evidence of discrimination. In the 1990’s African American conservatives asserted that affirmative action stigmatizes as inferior those African Americans who do gain entrance to prestigious universities or get good jobs. Yet other thinkers—white as well as African American—argue that many employers would hire no African Americans at all if they were not prodded to do so by the existence of a numerical goal. Racial Integration of Public Schools In Brown v. Board of Education, in 1954, the Supreme Court declared that officially enforced school segregation by race (then found mostly in the southern states) violated the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution. In a 1968 decision, the Supreme Court exerted pressure on southern school boards to end segregation more quickly; in a 1971 decision, Swann v. CharlotteMecklenberg Board of Education, the Court held that school busing— the transportation of children out of their neighborhoods for schooling—might be an appropriate tool for achieving desegregation. In the 1960’s, the question arose of what to do about the de facto racial segregation of the schools, based on neighborhood racial patterns rather than on the law, found in many northern cities. In 1973, the Supreme Court ordered, for the first time, a northern school district (Denver, Colorado) to institute a desegregation plan. In 1974, however, the Court, in a sudden shift (in the decision Milliken v. Bradley) banned busing for integration purposes across city-suburban boundaries. In general, the Court has ordered steps toward ending de facto segregation only when evidence exists that local authorities have deliberately rigged school district boundaries to keep the races apart. Ever since 1954, people have argued about how necessary integration of the races in the classroom is to providing equal educational opportunities for African American children. In the 1980’s, some African American thinkers, such as Thomas Sowell and Robert Woodson, had their doubts. Woodson argued that a neighborhood school, even if it is exclusively African American, can become a valuable focus of neighborhood pride for low-

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income city dwellers; Sowell pointed nostalgically to a highquality African American secondary school of the pre-1954 era of segregation, Dunbar High School in Washington, D.C. (Critics stress how atypical Dunbar was.) Integrationist scholars, however, argue that forcible exclusion from the company of white schoolchildren stigmatizes and psychically wounds African American children. The African American journalist Carl Rowan thinks that such exclusion is psychically wounding even if it results from white flight to the suburbs rather than government edict. White liberal political scientist Gary Orfield suggests that racial integration of the schools is necessary if African American children are to have greater access to information about jobs and other opportunities; white liberal education writer Jonathan Kozol contends, like many African American thinkers, that all African American public schools are more likely than integrated ones to be starved of money by legislatures that are beholden to white-majority electorates. Although the compulsory busing of children into schools predominantly of the other race may be necessary to achieve racial integration in some cases, it does severely limit the rights of parents, thereby causing some resentment. However, the rights of parents over their children are, as the African American philosopher Bernard R. Boxill points out, by no means absolute. There is a societal interest in promoting interracial harmony, Boxill suggests, that perhaps should be allowed to prevail over the wish of bigoted white parents to preserve their children from all contact with African American children, and perhaps even over the wishes of parents who simply wish to spare their children the additional time spent traveling to a school across town and home again. Rejecting the notion (found in the writings of African American conservative Glenn Loury) of an unresolvable tension between integrationist goals and individual rights, Boxill also argues that government can use inducements as well as penalties to promote integration, in education and in other areas. To promote integration of the schools while keeping busing to a minimum, some local school authorities have instituted so-

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called magnet schools. By placing elementary and secondary schools with above-average endowment in facilities and curricula in the middle of African American neighborhoods, authorities have sometimes persuaded, rather than forced, white parents to accept racial integration of the schools. Yet because funds are limited, the number of magnet schools that can be established is also limited; inevitably, some African American schoolchildren have often remained in primarily minority schools. Housing Integration By 1990, neither the federal Fair Housing Act of 1968 nor the many state and local laws banning discrimination in the sale or rental of housing had solved the problem of racially segregated neighborhoods. One troublesome issue that arises with respect to housing integration is the tension between individual rights and the goal of keeping a neighborhood integrated over time. Many whites are reluctant to live in a neighborhood or an apartment complex when the percentage of African American residents exceeds a certain number. To prevent wholesale evacuation by whites, so-called benign quotas have been introduced limiting the African American influx in the interest of stable integration. Benign quotas have been used by real estate agents in the Chicago suburb of Oak Park and by the management of the Starrett City apartment complex in New York City; in the latter case, the constitutionality of benign quotas was challenged in the 1980’s. Another difficult question is whether poor as well as middleor upper-income African Americans should be given the chance to live in the prosperous and mostly white suburbs. White suburbanites who might tolerate the occasional prosperous African American homeowner as a neighbor might also oppose the building of public housing projects in suburbia; yet it is the poorer African American who might benefit most from the greater employment opportunities found in the suburbs. In Chicago, the Gautreaux program attempted to circumvent the problem by settling small numbers of carefully selected poor African American families in prosperous white suburbs. In a 1993 magazine essay, Nathan Glazer argued that only an extremely intrusive government could make racially integrated

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neighborhoods remain racially integrated over time. Bernard Boxill contends, however, that not every action that is beyond the penalties of law is necessarily moral, and that government, if it cannot force whites to stay in integrated neighborhoods, can at least offer inducements for them to do so. Paul D. Mageli Further Reading Useful studies of integration can be found in Sheryll Cashin’s The Failures of Integration: How Race and Class Are Undermining the American Dream (New York: Public Affairs, 2004); Ingrid Gould Ellen’s Sharing America’s Neighborhoods: The Prospects for Stable Racial Integration (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2000); Tom Wicker’s Tragic Failure: Racial Integration in America (New York: Morrow, 1996); Bernard R. Boxill’s Blacks and Social Justice (Totowa, N.J.: Rowman & Allanheld, 1984); Gertrude Ezorsky’s Racism and Justice: The Case for Affirmative Action (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1991); Nathan Glazer’s Affirmative Discrimination: Ethnic Inequality and Public Policy (New York: Basic Books, 1975); Andrew Hacker’s Two Nations: Black and White, Separate, Hostile, Unequal (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1992); Jonathan Kozol’s Savage Inequalities: Children in America’s Schools (New York: Crown, 1991); Glenn C. Loury’s “Matters of Color—Blacks and the Constitutional Order,” in Slavery and Its Consequences: The Constitution, Equality, and Race, edited by Robert A. Goldwin and Art Kaufman (Washington, D.C.: American Enterprise Institute Press, 1988); Douglas S. Massey and Nancy A. Denton’s American Apartheid: Segregation and the Making of the Underclass (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1993); and Harvey Molotch’s Managed Integration: Dilemmas of Doing Good in the City (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1972). See also Affirmative action; Brown v. Board of Education; Civil Rights Act of 1964; Civil Rights movement; Defense industry desegregation; Military desegregation; School desegregation; Segregation; Segregation on the frontier

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Irish and African Americans The concern of Irish Americans for their own survival and their view of African Americans as competition worked to sour relations between the two struggling groups. Conflict has existed between Irish Americans and African Americans since the first great waves of Irish immigration in the 1840’s. Before the Civil War, Irish Catholics were confronted with harsh discrimination by Anglo-Protestant Americans. When dangerous work needed to be done, many employers opted to hire cheap Irish labor instead of using slaves, preferring to risk the life of an Irishman over one of their slaves, the latter being valuable property. Struggling to survive at the bottom of the economic ladder, the Irish feared that if slaves were set free, they would face even more competition for scarce jobs. Many also believed that they should focus their energies on improving their own plight before expending any of their resources in helping African Americans. Irish Americans’ concern for their own survival and their view of African Americans as competition worked to sour relations between the two struggling groups. The Civil War and Its Aftermath During the Civil War, Irish Americans, who were loyal to the Union generally, had no interest in fighting a war to free the slaves. During the war, when disproportionate numbers of poor Irish were drafted to serve in the Union forces, riots broke out in cities throughout the North. On July 13, 1863, antidraft rioting broke out in New York City, lasting until July 15. Irish Americans, who viewed the conflict as a rich man’s war fought by the poor, took out their anger at abolitionists and African Americans by burning, looting, and beating any African Americans in their path. New York militia were called out to stop the rioting. After the Civil War, the economic struggle between African Americans and Irish Americans continued. Irish Americans and other white immigrants took jobs in the booming indus-

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trial sector, and African Americans found themselves once again relegated to southern fields. Many African Americans, seeing immigrants usurp jobs they felt rightly belonged to them, began to engage in nativist rhetoric. Many African Americans vociferously supported the anti-immigration legislation of the 1920’s. Twentieth Century Changes As Irish Americans gained greater political and economic power in the twentieth century, they continued to do so at the expense of African Americans. Although literacy tests and other racist laws denied the majority of African Americans the vote until the Voting Rights Act of 1965, the Irish used their access to the ballot to gain control of local political machines and city halls. As they lost their brogues and became established in the mainstream of white America, the Irish used their political influence to monopolize civil service positions while excluding African Americans and new immigrants. By the twenty-first century, Irish Americans exceeded the national averages in education, income, and employment levels, while African Americans consistently lagged behind in all three areas. Although approximately one-third of African Americans could be considered at least middle class, poor African Americans outnumbered poor white Americans three to one. Kathleen Odell Korgen See also Cubans and African Americans; Economic trends; Employment; Jews and African Americans

Jackson’s run for the presidency The Event: Civil rights leader Jesse Jackson’s bid for the Democratic nomination for president Date: 1983-1984 As the first African American to mount a serious run for the presidency of the United States, Jesse Jackson offered an unusually strong voice on behalf of the poor and minority groups.

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In a memorable speech of November 3, 1983, Jesse Jackson became the first major African American candidate for the presidency of the United States. Using the rhythms and tones of the Southern Baptist preacher that he was, Jackson lashed out at the administration of President Ronald Reagan, charging that it was antiblack, anti-Hispanic, pro-rich, and promilitary. He also attacked his own party, accusing the Democrats of having been too weak in opposing the many threats posed by the Reagan presidency. The new candidate urged formation of a “rainbow coalition,” in which Americans of all races and ethnic groups would come together to oppose policies that hurt the poor and middle classes. Jackson’s Handicaps Jackson entered the race under a number of handicaps. Many people saw him as “a black candidate,” but far less than half the electorate was African American. Many African American leaders were already backing other Democratic hopefuls, and they made no move to switch to Jackson. While Jackson was a respected minister, community activist, and former associate of Martin Luther King, Jr., he had never held political office and could offer only modest evidence of expertise in foreign policy. The two strongest Democratic contenders, former vice president Walter Mondale and U.S. senator Gary Hart, both had abundant experience as elected officials. On the other hand, Jackson could boast of a remarkably successful life of devoted public service and prolific achievements in civil rights. While a student at North Carolina Agricultural and Technical State College, Jackson was simultaneously student body president, an honors student, and quarterback of the football team. After graduation, he was on the staff of North Carolina’s governor, Terry Stanford, and he attended Chicago Theological Seminary. While working for the Chicago office of Operation Breadbasket, he led protests that forced Chicago stores to hire more African Americans and to stock more goods made by blackowned firms. Soon Jackson was national director of Operation Breadbasket. Jackson was with King the night of the latter’s assassination, and he soon went to work as a top executive for King’s

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Southern Christian Leadership Conference. At the time he announced his candidacy for the presidency, Jackson was heading Operation PUSH (People United to Save Humanity), a group designed primarily to help minority-group children excel in school. Only seven weeks into the campaign, Jackson seized an opportunity to prove his abilities in the foreign policy arena. Syria was holding prisoner a downed U.S. pilot named Robert O. Goodman, Jr. Jackson charged that the Reagan administration was doing little to secure the pilot’s release, and stories in the press seemed to support Jackson’s charges. Jackson sent a message concerning the pilot to Syrian president Hafez al-Assad, and in response, Assad invited Jackson to come to Syria. Jackson did so and won the release of the pilot. While President Reagan and a number of other politicians initially criticized Jackson for interfering with U.S. foreign policy, all praised Jackson after his success. The Campaign Trail Back on the campaign trail, Jackson was hampered by an inexperienced and disorganized staff and by a scarcity of funds for running television spots. With only a modest advertising budget, Jackson had to rely on reporters for his public exposure. Soon his photograph was on the covers of dozens of magazines, and his voice was heard in scores of radio and television interviews. Jackson benefited from his speaking skills, which seemed to captivate audiences more than did the efforts of his main rivals, Mondale and Hart. In the first two contests for the Democratic nomination (those in Iowa and New Hampshire), Jackson was hurt by the lack of large minority populations in those states. In the Iowa caucuses, Jackson finished seventh, with less than 2 percent of the vote; in the New Hampshire primary, he placed fourth, with 6 percent of the total vote. Jackson’s first major test came with the Super Tuesday contests in a number of states, held on March 13, 1984. On that day, Jackson won 21 percent of Georgia’s vote and 20 percent in Alabama. A number of Democratic hopefuls dropped out of the presidential race, leaving only Mondale, Hart, and Jackson. As the primary season wore on, Jackson continued to show some real strength. In the important New York primary, Jackson

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won more than one-quarter of the vote. He placed first in the District of Columbia primary, taking 67 percent of the vote. While this District of Columbia win was expected, given the black majority in the nation’s capital, Jackson surprised most observers with his strong victory in Louisiana, where he captured 43 percent of the total vote. In Mississippi, Jackson finished ahead of Hart; in South Carolina, Jackson did better than either of his two rivals. Even in the industrial state of Illinois, Jackson won a respectable 21 percent. Jackson’s biggest stumble came over allegations that he was bigoted. An African American journalist reported that he had overheard Jackson referring to Jews as “Hymies” and to New York City as “Hymietown.” Jackson at first ducked reporters’ questions about the comments, but later admitted having used the terms. He did say that the remarks were simply slang, and that he used the terms with no animosity. Jackson’s reputation as a coalition-builder was also hurt by his friendship with Louis Farrakhan, an African American leader of the Nation of Islam. Farrakhan seemed to make threats against the life of the reporter who broke the “Hymietown” story, and he later referred to Judaism as a “gutter religion.” Jackson eventually distanced himself completely from Farrakhan’s words, but many liberal Democrats grew lukewarm toward the Jackson candidacy. The Democratice National Convention Going into the Democratic National Convention in San Francisco, it was clear that Mondale had enough delegates to secure his nomination. Still, Jackson remained a significant force: Many party leaders feared that Jackson would remain aloof from the Democratic campaign. Others feared that he might consider running as an independent. Jackson was able to play on these fears to get the Democratic convention to declare its support for affirmative action and to appoint a committee to consider the changes Jackson sought in delegate selection procedures. When the roll was called, Mondale had the support of 2,191 delegates, Hart 1,200, and Jackson 465. While Jackson fell well short of a victory, he had broken the color barrier by becoming the nation’s first major presidential hopeful who was African Ameri-

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can. Jackson won more than three times as many delegates as had an earlier African American candidate, Representative Shirley Chisholm, who had run in 1972. The 1984 Democratic convention also broke a gender barrier, as it tapped the first woman to appear on a major party ticket. Geraldine Ferraro was the convention’s choice for vice president. Jackson campaigned on behalf of the Mondale-Ferraro ticket, but the Democrats went down to defeat in 1984. Still, the Jackson candidacy had offered an unusually strong voice on behalf of the poor and minority groups. Such voices have appeared only infrequently on the presidential campaign trail. Stephen Cresswell Further Reading Barker, Lucius J. Our Time Has Come: A Delegate’s Diary of Jesse Jackson’s 1984 Presidential Campaign. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1988. Particularly strong first-person account of the Jackson campaign and the 1984 Democratic National Convention. Barker, Lucius J., and Ronald W. Walters, eds. Jesse Jackson’s 1984 Presidential Campaign: Challenge and Change in American Politics. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1989. Presents the Jackson campaign’s history from a variety of perspectives. Frady, Marshall. Jesse: The Life and Pilgrimage of Jesse Jackson. New York: Random House, 1996. Jackson, Jesse. A Time to Speak: The Autobiography of the Reverend Jesse Jackson. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1988. A good starting point for any study of Jackson’s 1984 presidential bid. Kimball, Penn. Keep Hope Alive: Super Tuesday and Jesse Jackson’s 1988 Campaign for the Presidency. Washington, D.C.: Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies, 1989. Covers the background and key events of Jackson’s 1988 presidential bid. Reed, Adolph L. The Jesse Jackson Phenomenon: The Crisis of Purpose in Afro-American Politics. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1986. Reed puts the 1984 Jackson campaign in the larger context of African American political history. Timmerman, Kenneth R. Shakedown: Exposing the Real Jesse Jackson. Washington, D.C.: Regnery, 2002.

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See also Chisholm’s election to Congress; Civil Rights movement; Politics and government; Rainbow Coalition; Southern Christian Leadership Conference; Wilder’s election to Virginia governorship

Jamaicans Identification: Immigrants from the West Indian island nation of Jamaica Coming from a country with different patterns of race relations than those of the United States, Jamaican immigrants have had to adjust their expectations as they have dealt with native-born black and white Americans. The movement of Jamaicans to the United States began in the early twentieth century and increased greatly after the 1965 relaxation of immigration restrictions. Jamaican immigrants clustered in metropolitan areas along the Eastern seaboard and in California, where many attained success as leaders in politics, religion, education, and business. The Caribbean island of Jamaica was colonized by Spaniards in the sixteenth century. After most of the Arawak Indians died, the Spanish brought African slaves to work their sugar plantations. The British acquired Jamaica in 1670 and continued the practice of slavery. West Indian slavery did not encourage passivity, nor did it damage slaves’ self-confidence to the extent that United States slavery did. Jamaican slavery ended in 1838, a generation before slavery’s demise in the southern United States. Jamaica gained national independence in 1962. Centuries of slavery left the island with a majority black population (many of whom were very poor), a smaller mixed-race segment, and a small, prosperous white population. Jamaica, unlike the United States, never developed Jim Crow laws, rigid color castes, or a tradition of lynching. Race is not a pressing issue in Jamaica, where black people occupy positions at all levels of society. Jamaican immigrants to the United States, most of whom are of African ancestry, often experience shock upon enter-

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ing a society with a powerful white majority and a long history of blatant and rigid color prejudice and discrimination. They develop various strategies to deal with racism, such as confrontation, resignation, and development of heightened race consciousness. Twentieth Century Immigration Immigration from Jamaica to the United States occurred throughout the twentieth century. Many propertied and educated Jamaicans had established themselves in New York City by the 1920’s. Other Jamaicans entered the country as temporary migrant farmworkers under special visas. During the World War II labor shortage, Jamaicans were encouraged to work on farms and in factories in the United States. The 1952 Immigration and Nationality Act reduced West Indian immigration; however Jamaican immigration surged following passage of the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965, which opened admission to nonwhite immigrants from Asia, Latin America, and the Caribbean. Jamaican newcomers settled mostly in the metropolitan areas of New York City and Miami. By 1990, 435,024 Jamaicans lived in the United States, about 80 percent of whom were foreign-born. The leading states of residence were New York, Florida, California, New Jersey, and Connecticut, according to 1990 U.S. census figures. During the 1990’s, Jamaican immigration into the United States averaged 18,000 people per year. Education, Business, and Leadership Jamaicans arriving in the first decades of the twentieth century became black community leaders in the areas of business, politics, and the arts. In New York City, many were business owners and professionals. Some, such as Marcus Garvey, became government, civil rights, or labor union leaders. Others, including Claude McKay, a prominent writer who helped found the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920’s, became cultural leaders. The 1965 immigration act established a preference for skilled migrants. Accordingly, Jamaican immigrants in the latter part of the twentieth century tended to be well educated. The departure of many technical, managerial, and professional workers badly

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needed for the island’s economic development has produced a “brain drain” in Jamaica. The value Jamaican immigrants place on education is reflected in the school performance of Jamaican American youth. Ruben Rumbaut’s 1992 survey found that the children of Jamaican immigrants tended to have high gradepoint averages and to score high on standardized reading and math tests. The children reported spending a large amount of time doing homework (versus watching television) and had very high educational aspirations. Comparisons with African Americans Economic motivation underlies much Jamaican migration, and some transplanted islanders become business owners. Social scientists vary in their interpretations of West Indian entrepreneurship. Some, such as Thomas Sowell and Daniel Patrick Moynihan, credit West Indians with habits of thrift and hard work that cause them to be more successful economically than native-born African Americans. The implication is that African Americans should not blame race discrimination for their poverty. Others, including Reynolds Farley and Stephen Steinberg, argue that Jamaican immigrants constitute a select group, skilled and highly motivated before they leave the island. Farley and Steinberg also argue that the differences in economic success between black immigrants and native-born African Americans have been exaggerated. Farley cites statistics showing that while West Indians are more often self-employed than U.S.-born blacks, the self-employment rate for whites is much larger than for either nonwhite group. Statistics for unemployment and income also place Jamaican Americans well below whites. Most Jamaican Americans are not self-employed. Many obtain advanced education and become lawyers, doctors, and teachers; others work in construction. Women have high labor force participation and many work in domestic service and nursing. Questions of Identity As Jamaican Americans attempt to arrive at a sense of racial or ethnic identity, they encounter opposing forces. On one hand, they tend to retain their ethnic identity, thinking of themselves as

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Jamaican Americans, because of the constant influx of new immigrants who revitalize distinct cultural elements of folklore, food preferences, religion, and speech. This separateness is enforced by the attitudes of African Americans, who sometimes resent the islanders because of their foreignness, their entrepreneurial success, and because some white employers apparently prefer foreign-born workers. On the other hand, Jamaican Americans may adopt an assimilated label, calling themselves black or African American, prompted by daily experiences with racism. Because of the conflicting pressures of living in the United States, second-generation islanders sometimes vacillate, at times identifying with African Americans and other times attempting to distance themselves from them. Nancy Conn Terjesen Further Reading Black Identities: West Indian Immigrant Dreams and American Realities (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1999) by Mary C. Waters and Crosscurrents: West Indian Immigrants and Race (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999) by sociologist Milton Vickerman both examine the Jamaican immigrant experience in the United States. Vickerman’s Crosscurrents contains interviews with Jamaicans in New York City who tell of contending forces of racism and equal treatment in the United States. Reynolds Farley and Walter R. Allen include a chapter on the economic status of West Indians in their The Color Line and the Quality of Life in America (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 1987). Vincent Parrillo’s Strangers to These Shores (5th ed., Boston: Allyn & Bacon, 1997) is a general treatment of race and ethnic relations with sections on both Jamaicans and Rastafarians. Alejandro Portes edited The New Second Generation (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 1996), which contains essays by many sociologists, including Ruben Rumbaut’s 1992 survey of immigrant children. See also Cubans and African Americans; Haitians; Pan-Africanism; Universal Negro Improvement Association; West Indians

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Jews and African Americans Relationships between Jews and African Americans have varied over time, as economic, geographical, and other factors have changed. When relations between Jews and African Americans were good, both groups dramatically advanced the cause of civil rights. Their joint efforts helped bring about the end of legal segregation. Although the leaders of the African American and Jewish communities enjoyed undeniably good relations in the thirty years after World War II, their friendship was not the historical norm. The periods before and after these years of closeness and cooperation were marked by ambivalence. The relationship between the two communities has varied across time, depending upon economic developments, geographical proximity, and the presence of other ethnic groups. Historical Background Although both Africans and Jews came to North America early, their interaction was very limited. Most of the Africans were slaves on plantations; however, almost no Jews owned slaves or had reason to interact with them. Minimal contact began in the mid-nineteenth century in southern and border-state towns that had a population of freed slaves and a scattering of Jews from Central Europe. The Jews, many of whom opposed slavery, were among the few merchants willing to trade with the former slaves. Both groups shared a sense of being outsiders, a strong attachment to the Hebrew Bible and its message of freedom for the slaves, and support for Abraham Lincoln and the liberal Republican Party during the Civil War (1861-1865). Large-scale immigration of Eastern European Jews did not start until the mid-1880’s. They came to the United States to escape legal discrimination, religious persecution, pogroms, and dire poverty. Very few of them had experienced any contact with African Americans; however, they firmly believed in equality and the rights of the workers, the oppressed, and the poor. Therefore, they were sympathetic to the plight of the African Americans, many of whom had moved from the rural South to northern

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cities in which Jews lived to escape problems very similar to those from which the Jews had fled. Depression and World War II During the Great Depression of the 1930’s, the Jewish and African American communities came into contact in large industrial cities, but relations were mixed. Both groups shared poverty and persecution and liberal Democratic affiliation. However, as some of the Jews began to prosper, conflict ensued. Many Jews went into business for themselves, partly because of prejudice against them in the workforce. Because they had limited resources, they opened small stores and later bought small apartment buildings in their urban neighborhoods. Normal shopkeeper-customer and landlord-tenant conflicts developed, intensified by the racial and ethnic differences. During World War II, the events in Germany provided a common enemy for Jews and African Americans, but that did not eliminate problems. Nazism was not a salient issue for most African Americans. One of the serious rifts between the two groups involved a charismatic member of the Nation of Islam, Sufi Ab-

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dul Hamid, who built a reputation for himself partly by insulting Jews and their religion. Post-World War II World War II and its aftermath provided opportunities for both groups. African Americans, still fleeing the South, moved into the neighborhoods evacuated by Jews. A decline in public anti-Semitism, combined with higher education, allowed Jews to move from blue-collar to white-collar jobs and to escape the inner-city ghettos. Many Jews who went to college were exposed to and apparently moved by the plight of African Americans. Early in the twentieth century, Jews had formed a number of organizations, such as the Anti-Defamation League, to protect their rights. Several Jews worked with African American leaders to help them bolster parallel institutions to protect black people’s rights, including the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), which had a significant Jewish presence both in funding and in legal staffing. These civil rights organizations grew in number and in strength, especially after the sit-ins in the South during the early 1960’s. The NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, later headed by Jack Greenberg, took the lead in prosecuting the civil rights cases that broke down the legal support for segregation. In the most famous case, Brown v. Board of Education (1954), a number of Jewish defense organizations acted as supporting counsel and argued, along with Thurgood Marshall, before the U.S. Supreme Court against the segregation laws. It was this cooperation at the top that led to the golden age of Jewish-African American relations. Cooperation and support by Jews pervaded the Civil Rights movement. Jews offered much stronger support for racial equality than did other white Americans. Jews constituted more than one-third of all the northern Freedom Riders who went to the South to help organize and register African American citizens to vote. The 1964 murder of two Jewish civil rights activists, Michael Schwerner and Andrew Goodman, and of African American activist James Chaney, was one of the defining moments of the Civil Rights movement.

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The Mid-1960’s and Black Power The bond between the Jews and African Americans began to unglue with the increasingly antiwhite and anti-Semitic rhetoric of young black radicals such as Stokely Carmichael (later Kwame Toure) of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. Leaders of the nascent Black Power movement wanted complete control over their destiny; they wanted to run their own organizations and to live by their own cultural standards, not those of white Europeans. The role of Jews in these movements, therefore, began to diminish. As the Black Power movement grew, several radical African Americans started attacking Israel, hastening the departure of most Jews. Many young secular Jews grew up with a strong affinity for civil rights but were ambivalent or had weak feelings toward Israel. However, because of the shrill anti-Israel rhetoric and the threat to Israel’s existence in 1967 by numerically larger Arab forces, American Jews started to become more supportive of the Israelis. As the younger generation of Jews left the Civil Rights movement in response to the rise of black power, they turned their attention to issues involving Israeli and Russian Jews, and their sense of themselves as an ethnic group increased. Although Carmichael was critical of the Jewish people, civil rights activist Martin Luther King, Jr., had many friends among Jewish leaders. King was a hero not just to African Americans but also to Jews, in part because of his intolerance for anti-Semitism and his support for Israel. King’s death accelerated the split between African Americans and Jews. In the terrible riots following his assassination, a disproportionate amount of loss was sustained by Jewish shopkeepers and landlords who had stayed in the ghetto because they could not afford to relocate. The remaining Jews left quickly. At the end of the 1960’s, a series of hostile confrontations occurred, many in New York, where unionized Jewish teachers battled local African American leaders. Disputes also arose over a proposed housing project in a middle-class Jewish neighborhood and among white-collar municipal employees over jobs and promotions. After the 1970’s, many of these inner-city conflicts

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subsided as Jews moved to the suburbs. For example, in the Los Angeles riots of 1992, friction arose between African Americans and Koreans, not Jews. In other cities, conflicts involved African Americans and Latinos rather than Jews. 1980’s and 1990’s Although friction between the two groups was more limited, it did not disappear. Black leader Jesse Jackson angered Jews during his 1984 bid for the presidency by referring to New York, which has a large Jewish population, as “Hymietown” (“hymie” is a derogatory term used to describe Jews) and courting Arab leader Yasser Arafat. On college campuses, a conflict of opinion arose over affirmative action. Jews, who had suffered from quotas that limited their enrollment in higher education, tended to oppose affirmative action, although perhaps less strongly than many white Americans. In 1991, in the racially mixed community of Crown Heights, Brooklyn, a car driven by a Hasidic Jew hit and killed an African American boy and injured his companion. In the rioting that followed, a Hasidic Jew was killed. An ongoing source of tension in the 1980’s and 1990’s was Louis Farrakhan, a dynamic and media-sensitive member of the Nation of Islam with a passionate hatred of Jews and Judaism, which he called a “gutter religion.” For many Jews, he was the devil incarnate; for many African Americans, he was an articulate spokesperson for black self-determinism and for self-respect and dignity. The ties between the two groups were never completely severed, however. Both groups tended to be liberal and Democratic, so they had a common political predisposition. They typically lived in the same metropolitan areas and had a partial common history. Nonetheless, at the beginning of the twentyfirst century, their political interests diverged. African Americans were focused on the large numbers of African Americans in what seemed like a permanent American underclass; Jews were worried about overseas Jews and their declining numbers due to widespread intermarriage and low birthrates. To many African Americans, Jews were just “white folks”; to many Jews, African

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Americans were ungrateful for the help that Jews had given to them in the past. Alan M. Fisher Further Reading Marc Schneier’s Shared Dreams: Martin Luther King, Jr. and the Jewish Community (Woodstock, Vt.: Jewish Lights, 1999) examines the relationship between an African American leader and the Jewish people. Two important contributions to the literature about African American and Jewish relations are Strangers and Neighbors: Relations Between Blacks and Jews in the United States (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1999) edited by Maurianne Adams and John Bracey and Struggles in the Promised Land: Towards a History of Black-Jewish Relations in the United States (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997) edited by Jack Salzman and Cornel West. Murray Friedman’s What Went Wrong: The Creation and Collapse of the Black-Jewish Alliance (New York: Free Press, 1995) provides the best single overview of relations between the two groups from a Jewish perspective. Hasia R. Diner’s In the Almost Promised Land: American Jews and Blacks, 1919-1935 (Westport, Conn.: Westview, 1977) examines the reasons behind Jewish leaders’ support of African Americans. Blacks and Jews: Alliance and Arguments, edited by Paul Berman (New York: Delacorte Press, 1994), is a collection of stimulating essays from African Americans and Jews, many close to the New York world of race and politics. Jonathan Kaufman’s Broken Alliance: The Turbulent Times Between Blacks and Jews in America (New York: Scribner’s, 1988) brings a sensitive, human perspective on change from the 1950’s to the 1980’s. Mary Berry and John W. Blassingame, two revisionist African American historians, address the role of whites, especially Jews, in Long Memory: The Black Experience (New York: Oxford University Press, 1982). See also Black Jews; Black Power movement; Civil Rights movement; Crown Heights conflicts; Irish and African Americans; Nation of Islam; National Association for the Advancement of Colored People

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Jim Crow laws Definition: State laws devised to uphold African American segregation, especially in the South Jim Crow laws were part of an organized attempt throughout the American South to keep African Americans permanently in a socially subordinate status in all walks of life and to limit possibilities for any form of contact between people of different racial backgrounds.

The precise origins of the term “Jim Crow” are unknown. It may have first appeared in 1832, in a minstrel play by Thomas D. “Big Daddy” Rice. The play contained a song about a slave titled “Jim Crow.” The expression was used commonly beginning in the 1890’s. In 1904, the Dictionary of American English listed the term “Jim Crow law” for the first time. Jim Crow laws had predecessors in the so-called black codes, passed in many southern states after the Civil War (1861-1865) to limit the freedom of African Americans and assure a continuous labor supply for the southern plantation economy. Radical Reconstruction, which placed most parts of the South under military government, put an end to this. Even after the official end of

Signs such as “Whites Ladies Only” on a public restroom were common during the days of Jim Crow, especially—but not only—in the South. (Library of Congress)

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Reconstruction in 1877, race relations in the South remained in a state of flux. The Jim Crow Era Jim Crow laws emerged during the 1880’s and 1890’s as conflict over political control in the South between different parties and between factions within parties intensified. Disfranchisement of African Americans and the segregation of white and black people were intended to assure the permanent subjugation of the latter and the prevention of future biracial political movements which could challenge white rule in the South. Domestic politics do not bear the sole responsibility, however: Jim Crow laws emerged at a time when the United States acquired colonies in the Pacific and the Caribbean and in the process subjugated the indigenous populations of those areas. Race theories used to justify American imperialism did not substantially differ from the white supremacy rhetoric of southern politicians. The first Jim Crow law was passed by the state of Florida in 1887, followed by Mississippi in 1888, Texas in 1889, Louisiana in 1890, Alabama, Arkansas, Georgia, and Tennessee in 1891, and Kentucky in 1892. North Carolina passed a Jim Crow law in 1898, South Carolina in 1899, and Virginia in 1900. Statutes requiring racial segregation had been quite common in northern states before the Civil War, but only in the postReconstruction South did racial segregation develop into a pervasive system regulating the separation of white and black in all walks of life. Jim Crow laws segregated public carriers, restaurants, telephone booths, residential areas, workplaces, public parks, and other recreational spaces. Mobile, Alabama, passed a special curfew law for African Americans in 1909. In Florida, the law required separate textbooks, which had to be separately stored. The city of New Orleans segregated white and black prostitutes in separate districts. Many states outlawed interracial marriages. Jim Crow laws were not even limited to life: Cemeteries, undertakers, and medical school cadavers were all subjects of segregation under the laws.

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These laws, however, represented only symptoms of larger and even more pervasive patterns of discrimination and racial oppression. White vigilante groups, such as the Ku Klux Klan, often enforced their own brand of racial justice through violent means, frequently with the quiet consent and even cooperation of law enforcement officers. In addition, contract labor laws and corrupt law enforcement and prison officials created a system of peonage, which kept large numbers of African Americans in the turpentine and cotton belts in debt slavery. U.S. Supreme Court In the process of legally entrenching racial segregation through so-called Jim Crow laws, the U.S. Supreme Court served as a willing handmaiden. In the 1883 Civil Rights cases, the Supreme Court ruled that segregation in privately owned railroads, theaters, hotels, restaurants, and similar places comprised private acts of discrimination and as such did not fall under the Fourteenth Amendment. In the 1896 case of Plessy v. Ferguson, concerning the constitutionality of a Louisiana Jim Crow law, the Supreme Court redefined segregation from a matter of private prejudice into a mandate of state law. In Plessy v. Ferguson, the Supreme Court approved of segregation as long as facilities were “separate but equal.” In the 1930’s and 1940’s, the Supreme Court began to strike down segregation. Eventually, on May 17, 1954, the Supreme Court, in the landmark decision in Brown v. Board of Education, declared that separate facilities by their very nature were unequal, thereby reversing previous decisions. Thomas Winter Further Reading Excellent starting points in understanding the Jim Crow era are Michael J. Klarman’s From Jim Crow to Civil Rights: The Supreme Court and the Struggle for Racial Equality (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004) and C. Vann Woodward’s The Strange Career of Jim Crow (3d rev. ed., New York: Oxford University Press, 1974). For a valuable survey of the relations between African Americans and the law, see Loren Miller’s The Petitioners: The Story of the Supreme Court of the United States and the Negro (New

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York: Pantheon Books, 1966). See also Paul Finkelman, ed., Race, Law, and American History, 1700-1900 (11 vols., New York: Garland, 1992). Of particular interest in this series is volume 4, The Age of Jim Crow: Segregation from the End of Reconstruction to the Great Depression. On peonage, see Pete Daniel, The Shadow of Slavery: Peonage in the South, 1901-1969 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1972). See also Black codes; Brown v. Board of Education; Civil Rights cases; Disfranchisement laws in Mississippi; Guinn v. United States; Ku Klux Klan; Lynching; Miscegenation laws; National Association for the Advancement of Colored People; Negro Conventions; Newberry v. United States; Plessy v. Ferguson; Poll taxes; Restrictive covenants; Segregation; Slavery and race relations

Jones v. Alfred H. Mayer Company The Case: U.S. Supreme Court ruling on housing discrimination Date: June 17, 1968 In this landmark decision, the Supreme Court used the Thirteenth Amendment banning slavery to outlaw racial discrimination in housing. Joseph Lee Jones, alleging that a real estate company had refused to sell him a house because he was African American, sought relief in a federal district court. Since the case appeared before the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1968, Jones and his lawyer relied primarily on a provision of the 1866 Civil Rights Act that gave all citizens the same rights as white citizens in property transactions. Both the district court and the court of appeals dismissed the complaint based on the established view that the 1866 law applied only to state action and did not address private acts of discrimination. The U.S. Supreme Court, however, accepted the case for review. All the precedents of the Supreme Court supported the conclusions of the lower courts. In the Civil Rights cases (1883) the Court had ruled that the Thirteenth Amendment allowed Con-

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gress to abolish “all badges and incidents of slavery,” but the Court had narrowly interpreted these badges or incidents as not applying to private acts of discrimination. In Hodges v. United States (1906) the Court held that Congress might prohibit only private actions that marked “a state of entire subjection of one person to the will of another,” and even in Shelley v. Kraemer (1948) the Court recognized the right of individuals to make racially restrictive covenants. In Jones v. Alfred H. Mayer Company, however, the Court surprised observers by voting 7 to 2 to overturn its precedents. Writing for the majority, Justice Potter Stewart asserted that Congress under the Thirteenth Amendment possessed the power “to determine what are the badges and incidents of slavery, and the authority to translate that determination into effective legislation.” In addition, the majority reinterpreted the 1866 law so that it proscribed both governmental and private discrimination in property transactions—an interpretation that is questioned by many authorities. Justice John M. Harlan wrote a dissenting opinion which argued that the majority probably was wrong in its interpretation of the 1866 law. Harlan also wrote that the passage of the Fair Housing Act of 1968 eliminated the need to render this decision that relied on such questionable history. Since the Jones decision was based on the Thirteenth rather than the Fourteenth Amendment, it was important in diluting the Court’s traditional distinction between state and private action, and it appeared to grant Congress almost unlimited power to outlaw private racial discrimination. Jones became a precedent for new applications of the almost forgotten post-Civil War statutes in cases such as Griffin v. Breckenridge (1971) and Runyon v. McCrary (1976). In the quarter-century after Jones, however, the Congress did not pass any major legislation based upon the authority of the Thirteenth Amendment. Thomas Tandy Lewis See also Civil Rights Act of 1968; Civil Rights Acts of 1866-1875; Civil Rights cases; Griffin v. Breckenridge; Moose Lodge v. Irvis; Patterson v. McLean Credit Union; Restrictive covenants; Runyon v. McCrary; Segregation; Shelley v. Kraemer

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Journey of Reconciliation The Event: Direct-action campaign organized by the Congress of Racial Equality Date: April 9-23, 1947 Place: Washington, D.C., Virginia, North Carolina, Tennessee, and Kentucky The Journey of Reconciliation attracted national attention to the Congress of Racial Equality, helping to strengthen the organization at a time when its resources were scarce, and also established nonviolent direct action as the organization’s identifying mark and served as a model for the Freedom Rides of the early 1960’s. Three forces converged to bring about the 1947 Journey of Reconciliation, which was sponsored jointly by the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) and the Fellowship of Reconciliation (FOR). The first and most basic was CORE’s desire to launch a directaction campaign that would attract national attention and thus strengthen the organization at a time when its resources were meager and its activities limited. Since its founding in 1942 by a biracial group in Chicago, CORE had been committed to nonviolent direct action on the model of Mohandas K. Gandhi in India and had sponsored sit-ins and other forms of nonviolent protest. Its budget was barely $100 per month in 1945-1946, however, and its public visibility was low. When George M. Houser became the executive secretary of CORE in 1945, a successful national campaign was one of his chief goals. A white activist in FOR when he was chosen for the new position, Houser had been involved with James Farmer and others in founding CORE and was concerned that its first three years of efforts had fallen short of his dream of making CORE a major force for nonviolent reform in the United States. The second major impetus for the journey was the U.S. Supreme Court decision in the Morgan v. Virginia case (1946) that declared Virginia’s policy of racial segregation on interstate motor carriers unconstitutional. When several bus companies refused to comply with the decision, Houser saw their resistance as the opportunity he had looked for. Nonviolent direct action, he be-

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In 1930, Mohandas K. Gandhi (center front in bare legs) led Indian nationalist on a peaceful march to the sea to protest British restrictions on Indian salt manufacture. The march helped inspire later protest marches in the United States, including the Journey of Reconciliation. (National Archives)

lieved, might help the cause of desegregated transportation while strengthening CORE’s impact. Bayard Rustin, a longtime activist who had served causes such as Gandhi’s liberation efforts in India and several antiwar campaigns, agreed. A founder of CORE’s New York branch, Rustin was quite familiar with the organization’s goals and needs. At CORE’s fall, 1946, executive committee meeting, he and Houser argued that the recent Morgan v. Virginia decision provided a promising setting for demonstrating the potential of nonviolent direct action. Both men at the time were secretaries in FOR’s Racial Industrial Department and had the support of A. J. Muste, a widely known pacifist and FOR executive. Throughout the fall and winter of 1946-1947, Rustin and Houser gained other supporters both within and outside their organizations. By January, 1947, they were ready to take a prelimi-

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nary trip along the proposed route both to gain additional partners and to finalize the details. Their original plan to extend the trip into the Deep South all the way to New Orleans was abandoned because of the possibility of violent resistance. The Journey of Reconciliation, as they called it after discussions with FOR staffers, would be confined to the upper southern states from Virginia to North and South Carolina. The third contributing factor to the journey was interorganizational cooperation among civil rights groups, augmented by local individuals and churches. During their planning trip in January, 1947, Houser and Rustin enlisted a significant number of college students and African American church members to provide housing and food for the journey participants. The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) had serious misgivings about the journey and refrained from active support, but it did offer its local contacts in several communities along the route. The NAACP’s reluctance was caused by its fear of violent backlash if the travelers went into the Deep South or possibly even the border states. CORE’s decision to confine the trip to the Virginia and Carolina areas helped ameliorate this concern, but not sufficiently to convince the NAACP executive secretary, Walter White, to provide funds or active assistance. In late March and early April, 1947, the sixteen participants in the journey engaged in intense training in Washington, D.C. Anticipating the training techniques of the 1960’s, such as roleplaying, lectures and discussions, and learning ways to protect oneself in case of violent resistance, they prepared. The Journey Begins On April 9, the group of eight whites and eight African Americans left the nation’s capital and headed southward through northern Virginia. Ideologically, the biracial group shared much. All the white members were pacifists—James Peck of the Peck and Peck clothing business family, George M. Houser, Homer Jack of the Chicago Council Against Racial and Religious Discrimination, New York horticulturalist Igal Roodenko, and four others of varied professional backgrounds. Two of them, Joseph Felmet of Asheville, North Carolina, and James Peck, were social-

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ists affiliated with the Workers Defense League. Peck was editor of the league’s news bulletin. The other three white participants were two North Carolina Methodist pastors, Ernest Bromley and Louis Adams, and Worth Randle, a Cincinnati biologist. Four of the black participants in the Journey of Reconciliation were also pacifists, among them Bayard Rustin, whose activist career included support for Gandhi’s liberation efforts in India. Rustin was particularly controversial because of his earlier affiliation with communism, an unusual association among black leaders, but he had abandoned communism by the early 1940’s. In addition to Rustin and Homer Jack, the black participants were freelance lecturer Wallace Nelson; Conrad Lynn, a New York attorney; Andrew Johnson, a student from Cincinnati; Chicago musician Dennis Banks; William Worthy of the New York Council for a Permanent FEPC (Fair Employment Practices Commission); and Eugene Stanley of A. and T. College in North Carolina. From Washington, the group traveled to Richmond, Virginia, where the first overnight stop was scheduled. Half the group traveled on a Greyhound bus, the other half on the Trailways line. Each ticket listed every planned stopover in cities where the riders would address meetings in churches, but the planners had determined that the ultimate destination on each ticket required crossing a state line, since their specific goal was to implement the Morgan decision of 1946. The plan was to travel across Virginia, into North Carolina, Tennessee, and Kentucky, and then back across Virginia. The entire journey took two weeks. Meetings were arranged chiefly by the NAACP in cooperation with local churches. Peck reported that it was exciting to begin the journey after months of anticipation and to be actually “on stage,” trying to challenge resistance to the recent court decision. The underlying hope of the participants was not only to enforce a law but also to change attitudes. If idealistic, this goal was basic to those who set out on the potentially dangerous trip, usually regarded as the first Freedom Ride. Although the journey elicited no major violent response, there were several arrests. The first was on a Trailways carrier as the group left Petersburg, Virginia. James Peck was arrested in Dur-

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ham, North Carolina, along with Rustin and Andrew Johnson, during a rally in a church. Durham was a small but prosperous city with better paving, housing, and other facilities in the white sections than in the black; Peck was bothered by this and spoke out against it. He and the others were detained only briefly and then taken by car to Chapel Hill, the nearby site of the University of North Carolina. Interestingly, the Chapel Hill area was the only stop on the journey that witnessed real violence. In Cargill, a small town just outside Chapel Hill’s city limits, Peck was hit by a group of taxi drivers as he stood outside his bus. Inside four of the journey group were arrested when they tried to integrate the front seats. Released on bail, they were taken by a local white Presbyterian minister to his home for protection, but cabs full of hostile resisters wielded rocks and sticks and warned the minister that they would burn his home if he did not get the group out of town. Other arrests occurred in Asheville, North Carolina, as the group traveled westward toward Tennessee after stopping in Greensboro. Again, Peck was arrested. The issue was the same in Asheville as in Chapel Hill—trouble over the effort to integrate the whites only seats. Asheville happened to be the home of one of the white participants Joe Felmet, and some of the group stayed overnight in his home. In the trial the next day, Peck and his codefendant, a black participant from Chicago named Dennis Banks, were found guilty and sentenced to thirty days on a road gang. The state’s attorney and the judge who presided did not know about the Morgan decision and borrowed a copy of the decision from Curtis Todd, a black attorney who represented the riders. As it turned out, Banks and Peck remained in jail only a few hours and were released, but during that time, the other prisoners vented their anger at Peck, a white man supporting African Americans. Eventually, the state dropped the case when its officials learned more about the 1946 Court decision. From Asheville, the Journey of Reconciliation continued into Knoxville, Tennessee, then northward into Kentucky and back across Virginia before ending in Washington on April 23. Of the five arrest cases during the two-week trip, all but one were dropped. The Chapel Hill case was pursued by prosecutors, and

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Rustin, Joe Felmet, and Igal Roodenko served thirty days at hard labor on a road gang. Nevertheless, there were no reporters waiting to interview the participants and nothing like the intense journalistic enthusiasm that would mark the Freedom Rides fourteen years later. The Journey of Reconciliation was a pioneering effort that at the time attracted a disappointingly slight response from the press and the public. Impact of the Journey The significance of the Journey of Reconciliation lay, in the short run, in the heightened publicity it elicited and the inspiration it gave to advocates of social change by means of nonviolent direct action. Although no reporters were waiting to interview the participants when they returned, press coverage of the various incidents during the trip was fair and rather extensive. Both Houser and Rustin were pleased with the details of press accounts and considered them positive. For the participants themselves, newspaper articles were important for their later efforts to gain support and recruit new activists. Indeed, many years later, CORE leaders used stories of the journey to teach nonviolent theory and encourage participation. James Peck was particularly encouraged by the response of people in general to the effort and noted that drivers, other passengers, and observers were sympathetic toward desegregation but were ignorant of various laws. Seeing the journey activists demonstrate nonviolent techniques, he felt, contributed to greater understanding and support. At a deeper level, the Journey of Reconciliation was a truly paradigmatic event. Strictly speaking, it was the first Freedom Ride. What is usually termed the first Freedom Ride in popular parlance was actually modeled after the 1947 precedent in key respects. Peck, who was active in both the 1947 journey and the 1961 Freedom Rides, saw the earlier event as supremely significant in the longer process of rides by desegregationist activists, describing it as “perhaps the most unique and outstanding undertaking CORE has ever made.” CORE trainers used both the concept of the journey and the methodology of nonviolent protest in preparing for the 1961 rides into the Deep South.

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As a factor in the history of racial and ethnic rights, the Journey of Reconciliation is somewhat analogous to the 1962 desegregation efforts in Albany, Georgia. In both cases, the immediate goals were not achieved quickly. The specific objective of the journey was to intensify grassroots efforts to achieve a greater degree of desegregation in public transportation. That did not happen quickly, but the effort did increase public awareness of the problem and did encourage many other efforts to desegregate interstate buses, trains, and other conveyances. In doing that, the 1947 journey into the upper South also demonstrated that nonviolence had much more potential than many people realized to augment legal efforts to bring about racial equality. Spiritually and intellectually, the leaders were encouraged to perpetuate the nonviolent method. Like Albany, the Journey of Reconciliation was a source of inspiration to challenge racial segregation and discrimination by concerted group action. That aspect of the journey’s impact continued to have influence throughout the 1950’s and into the following decade. CORE The judicial proceedings that occurred during and after the Journey of Reconciliation were also significant for CORE’s later development. The several cases that grew out of the trip were pursued by attorneys who supported CORE’s objectives and provided useful experience in using the details of local and state laws to show contradictions with Supreme Court decisions and thus to bring to bear on local problems the larger influence of federal law. This was a rather slowly developing process since bus companies often cited state law as their guide and delayed implementing federal mandates until the courts made it clear that they applied. CORE’s finances and public visibility remained rather low even after the journey, but it was the first of several undertakings that would gradually propel the organization to higher public recognition and larger membership. FOR assisted CORE in pursuing some of the cases, including the Chapel Hill litigation in the months immediately following the journey. By the 1950’s, CORE was beginning to grow in several of its chapters and to equip it-

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self for a larger role in racial desegregation litigation. Above all, the trip was a favorite topic of conversation and sparked training programs that led eventually to the 1960’s Freedom Rides, an event that elicited widespread media coverage and support by youth across the nation. The Journey of Reconciliation was clearly a high point in CORE’s history, as well as a model for the potential efficacy of nonviolent direct action. Thomas R. Peake Further Reading Bell, Inge Powell. CORE and the Strategy of Nonviolence. New York: Random House, 1968. This work traces and analyzes the development of CORE’s use of nonviolent direct action from its early days until the height of the Civil Rights movement in the 1960’s. Both conceptual and historical, it is useful for showing how direct action distinguished CORE from the older mainstream civil rights organizations. Contains notes, bibliography, and index. D’Emilio, John. Lost Prophet: The Life and Times of Bayard Rustin. New York: Free Press, 2003. Farmer, James. “On Cracking White City.” In My Soul Is Rested, edited by Howell Raines. New York: Putnam, 1977. In this introductory section of Raines’s valuable oral history of the Civil Rights movement, James Farmer provides perspective on the evolution of protest thought. One of the founders of CORE, Farmer had a distinctive vantage point for demonstrating the difficulties and successes of the early movement. He underscores the importance of the 1946 Supreme Court decision that declared segregated interstate bus seating unconstitutional and notes the importance of the journey as a precedent for the Freedom Rides. Houser, George, and Bayard Rustin. We Challenged Jim Crow! A Report on the Journey of Reconciliation, April 9-23, 1947. New York: Fellowship of Reconciliation, 1947. This brief but valuable report lists and describes all participants in the Journey of Reconciliation, outlines the highlights of the experiences in each city, and gives brief accounts of several arrests and trials. It also includes a statement on the purposes and nature of

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CORE and explanations of its nonviolent theory. No notes or index. Levine, Daniel. Bayard Rustin and the Civil Rights Movement. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 2000. Meier, August, and Elliott Rudwick. CORE: A Study in the Civil Rights Movement 1942-1968. New York: Oxford University Press, 1973. A detailed account of the origins, development, and campaigns of CORE from 1942 to the late 1960’s, when the organization began to wane. Well documented with CORE primary materials, this book is the standard account that demonstrates the periodic resurgence of the organization and explains the basic reasons for its problems after 1966. Contains a thorough list of references and an index. Morris, Aldon D. The Origins of the Civil Rights Movement: Black Communities Organizing for Change. New York: Free Press, 1984. This essential background study for most civil rights activities in the South includes extensive information on all the movement centers and organizations of the period. Its value on this topic is chiefly its analysis of CORE in its early days, particularly its establishment of a base in the South during the decade following the Journey of Reconciliation. Contains notes, bibliography, and index. Peck, James. Freedom Ride. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1962. This compact account is particularly valuable because its author was a leading participant in both the Journey of Reconciliation and the later Freedom Rides. A white liberal, Peck was at times injured by opponents of integration yet persisted in his civil rights activism. One sees in his work the emotions, risks, and goals of the freedom riders. Has references and an index. Sargent, Frederic O. The Civil Rights Revolution: Events and Leaders, 1955-1968. Foreword by Bill Maxwell. Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland & Co., 2004. Schmeidler, Emilie. Shaping Ideas and Actions: CORE, SCLC, and SNCC in the Struggle for Equality. Ann Arbor, Mich.: University Microfilms International, 1980. This carefully prepared doctoral dissertation examines CORE’s place among the leading civil rights advocacy organizations whose principal method

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was nonviolent direct action. The section on CORE includes a valuable analysis of the CORE model of direct action that combined Gandhian methods and distinctive efforts to shape positive interracial attitudes. Contains reference notes, bibliography, and a table of contents. See also Baseball’s integration; Freedom Rides; President’s Committee on Civil Rights

Kansas-Nebraska Act The Law: Federal law that allowed for the expansion of slavery into territories in which it had been previously banned by the Missouri Compromise of 1820 Date: Signed into law on May 30, 1854 Generally viewed as a compromise between pro- and antislavery positions by its sponsor, Stephen Douglas, the Kansas-Nebraska Act gave encouragement to proslavery forces. The issue of the expansion of slavery was laid aside only temporarily with the passage of the Compromise of 1850, although the compromise had seemed to be fairly successful in the two or three years immediately following its enactment. Several events kept the compromise in the public eye, including the seizure in the North of African Americans under the provisions of the Second Fugitive Slave Law (1850), the publication of Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin in 1852, and the last of three filibustering expeditions launched from New Orleans in August, 1851, by Venezuelan Narcisco Lopez against Spanish Cuba. Many people in the United States hoped that the slavery issue would disappear, and the economic pressures of life absorbed the attention of most average citizens. Moreover, no prominent politicians had captured the public’s imagination. Lackluster, noncontroversial candidates were nominated in the presidential campaign of 1852—Franklin Pierce of New Hampshire for the Democrats and General Winfield Scott for the Whigs. The election, won by Pierce, was no more exciting than the candidates.

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Evidence of the desire of U.S. voters to maintain the status quo was demonstrated further in the poor showing of John P. Hale of New Hampshire, the standard-bearer of the Free-Soil Party. With the Democrats in control and apparently committed to the Compromise of 1850, the United States seemed destined to at least another four years of relative calm. Slavery in the Territories The issue of slavery in the federal territories was reopened in January, 1854, when Stephen A. Douglas of Illinois, chairman of the Committee on Territories, reported a bill to organize the Platte country west of Iowa and Missouri as the territory of Nebraska. Douglas’s main interest was in opening the West to settlement and to the construction of a railroad to the Pacific coast. Douglas did not wish to deal with the slavery question and he (like his soon-to-be nemesis, Abraham Lincoln) doubted that the institution could survive on the Great Plains, but he realized that he needed southern votes to get the territorial bill through Congress. In the original form, the bill included a provision, similar to that found in the acts organizing the territories of Utah and New

Stephen A. Douglas. (Library of Congress)

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Mexico, that the territory would determine the question of its status as a slave or free state at the time of admission. The clause dealing with slavery was intentionally ambiguous, but it probably would have left in effect—at least during the territorial stage— the provisions of the Missouri Compromise that barred slavery in the Louisiana Purchase territory north of 36° north latitude. The ambiguity of the bill bothered southern political leaders, particularly the rabidly proslavery David R. Atchison of Missouri, president pro tempore of the Senate and acting vice president. Yielding to the pressure of Senator Atchison and other southern leaders, Douglas and his committee added a section to the bill that permitted the people of the territory, acting through their representatives, to decide whether the territory should be slave or free. This “popular sovereignty” formula for dealing with the slavery question implied the repeal of the Missouri Compromise restriction on slavery. The Spoils System The proslavery leaders were not satisfied with the implicit abrogation of the Missouri Compromise. As Whig senator Archibald Dixon of Kentucky pointed out, under popular sovereignty, the restriction of slavery would remain in effect until the territorial settlers acted to end it. In the interim, immigration of slaveholders into the territory would be prohibited. Proslavery leadership forced Douglas to amend the bill further so as to repeal explicitly that section of the Missouri Compromise prohibiting slavery north of 36° north latitude. In addition, the territory was divided at the fortieth parallel into the two territories of Kansas and Nebraska. Most northerners considered the Missouri Compromise to be a sacred pledge, and its repeal was quite enough to destroy the relative political calm that had been prevalent in the nation since 1850. Much more was at work, however. The Missouri Compromise had led to the creation of the political party system, utilized by the Democrats and finally adopted by the Whigs, under which party loyalty was ensured through the disposition of party and government jobs (known as patronage or the spoils system). Under that system, the tensions created by the Missouri Com-

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In fashioning legislation to organize the territory of Nebraska, Illinois senator Stephen A. Douglas was pressured by proslavery leadership to amend the final bill so as to repeal the section of the Missouri Compromise prohibiting slavery north of 36°30 ′. In addition, the territory was divided at the fortieth parallel into the two territories of Kansas and Nebraska. Most Northerners considered the Missouri Compromise to be a sacred pledge; its repeal destroyed the political calm that had been preserved by the Compromise of 1850 and resulted in “Bleeding Kansas,” a small civil war that presaged the Civil War of 1861.

promise were to be kept under control, for anyone could be controlled by the promise of employment, according to the assumptions of the new party system. The effect of the party system was to increase the size and scope of federal government operations in every election, because to get elected, a candidate had to promise more jobs than his opponent. The result for the slavery interests was that the South, slowly but surely, was being placed in a permanent minority status in the Senate and House. If an antislavery president were elected, the now-powerful federal government could act directly on slavery in the South. The Kansas-Nebraska Act, especially Douglas’s concept of popular sovereignty, offered hope to the South that the dynamic created by the spoils system could be short-circuited. If territories

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could decide whether or not to permit slavery, then slave interests could flood the new territories with proslavery settlers and vote in slavery, regardless of the attitudes of Congress or the president. Douglas still had to guide the bill through passage in the face of widespread and violent criticism from the North. The bill was certain of passage in the Senate, although it was the object of impassioned attack by Senators Salmon Chase of Ohio and Charles Sumner of Massachusetts. In the House, however, the issue was doubtful, and it was there that Douglas marshaled the power of the Pierce administration to force dissident Democrats into line behind the bill. Passage of the Act By whip and spur, the Kansas-Nebraska Act was driven through the House by a large sectional vote of 113-100. Nearly all southern Democrats supported the measure. All forty-five northern Whigs opposed it, while thirteen of nineteen southern Whigs, led by Alexander Stephens of Georgia, favored it. The divisiveness of the issue was represented best by the fact that of eighty-six northern Democrats, forty-two voted against it in spite of patronage and other pressures brought to bear by administration leaders. In doing so, the Democrats showed the utter futility of basing a slavery strategy on the spoils system: Ideology proved stronger than economics, and the idea that the national debate over slavery could be contained with the promise of a few jobs was mortally wounded. The passage of the Kansas-Nebraska Act had momentous consequences. The act touched off the forces that eventually brought war. It reopened sectional issues and embittered sectional relations by arousing the entire North. It destroyed the Whig Party in the Deep South and increased southern unity and influence in the Democratic Party. It contributed greatly to the demise of the Whig Party in the North and divided the northern Democrats, inducing many of them to leave the party. Most important, it led to the formation, beginning in 1854, of the Republican Party. That party was founded in diametric opposition to the operating principles of the Democratic Party. Instead of holding that economic

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self-interest took precedence over ideology, the Republicans held that fundamental beliefs mattered more than temporal, material benefits in the long run. The Republicans thus made slavery—the issue that the Democrats and the Whigs refused to touch—the focal point of their campaigns. On a personal level, Douglas gained little support in the South and lost an important part of his support in the North. Douglas, misinterpreting northern sentiment toward this initially innocent piece of legislation, had opened a political Pandora’s box. The legislation reflected Douglas’s personal views accurately, though. He sincerely disliked slavery, but thought that it was an issue of choice of the slaveholder; therefore, the matter of human bondage was not a moral issue but simply a matter of votes. Douglas could say honestly that he opposed slavery personally, but supported a slaveholder’s right to own slaves. Thus, the agony of Douglas and the struggle for Kansas had begun. John C. Gardner Updated by Larry Schweikart Further Reading Gienapp, William E. The Origins of the Republican Party, 1852-1856. New York: Oxford University Press, 1987. A seminal book that downplays the role of specific events in the success of the Republican Party and emphasizes the competition between the Know-Nothings and the Republicans. Focuses on the collapse of the Whigs and the nativist movements that reflected mass changes at the state levels. Holt, Michael. The Political Crisis of the 1850’s. New York: W. W. Norton, 1978. A thorough treatment of the era, emphasizing the breakdown of the two-party system as a cause of the Civil War. Downplays economic and cultural factors. Johannsen, Robert W. Stephen A. Douglas. New York: Oxford University Press, 1973. The quintessential biography of Douglas. McPherson, James W. Battle Cry of Freedom: The Era of the Civil War. New York: Oxford University Press, 1988. A broad historical narrative, emphasizing slavery and cultural differences as the causes of the Civil War.

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Nevins, Allen. A House Dividing, 1852-1857. Vol. 2 in Ordeal of the Union. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1947. A brilliantly written, classic interpretation of sectional differences as the cause of war. Encompasses people, events, economics, culture, and ideology. The single best starting place for an understanding of the United States in 1854. Nichols, Roy Franklin. “The Kansas-Nebraska Act: A Century of Historiography.” Mississippi Valley Historical Review 43 (September, 1956): 187-212. A traditional guide to the historical literature and a concise account of the legislative history and consequences of the act. Posits the “blundering generation” of politicians as the cause of sectional strife. Wolff, Gerald. The Kansas-Nebraska Bill: Party, Section, and the Coming of the Civil War. New York: Revisionist Press, 1977. Another interpretation of the Civil War emphasizing party breakdown, but specific to the Kansas-Nebraska Act. See also Bleeding Kansas; Civil War; Compromise of 1850; Fugitive Slave Law of 1793; Fugitive Slave Law of 1850; Harpers Ferry raid; Missouri Compromise; Proslavery argument; Scott v. Sandford; Slavery and the justice system

Katzenbach v. McClung The Case: U.S. Supreme Court ruling on segregation in public accommodations Date: December 14, 1964 Case upholding Title II of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 as applied to a restaurant. Enforcement of the ruling speeded the end of racial segregation. The U.S. Congress has no constitutionally delegated power to regulate local business practices. If such practices can be shown to affect interstate commerce, however, Congress can reach them under its powers regulating commerce. In this way, Congress can use its authority to control interstate commerce to address social and economic problems. After five months of committee hearings

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Signs such as this were common before the Civil Rights Act of 1964 began to turn the tide against government-sanctioned racial discrimination. (Library of Congress)

and seven months of debate, Congress passed the Civil Rights Act of 1964. The act represented Congress’s most sweeping attack on race discrimination since the Civil Rights Act of 1875. Katzenbach v. McClung involved a challenge to the constitutionality of Title II of the act and raised the question of whether Congress could use its authority to regulate interstate commerce to ban racial discrimination in public accommodations. The case was argued along with Heart of Atlanta Motel v. United States, in which the U.S. Supreme Court upheld the constitutionality of Title II’s prohibitions of race discrimination in the hotel and motel industry. Katzenbach v. McClung centered on Ollie’s Barbecue, a small family-owned restaurant in Birmingham, Alabama, that provided sit-down service for whites but only take-out service for African Americans. If the discrimination practiced at this restaurant involved the state of Alabama, courts could intervene to enforce the Fourteenth Amendment’s equal protection clause. In this case, however, no one claimed that the state supported the restaurant’s practice. If large numbers of interstate travelers frequented the restaurant, Congress could intervene by using its power to regulate interstate commerce. However, Ollie’s Barbe-

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cue seemed to be a local operation rarely visited by interstate travelers. Writing for the unanimous Court, Justice Thomas Clark ruled on December 14, 1964, that Congress could regulate this restaurant because a substantial portion of the food served there had moved in interstate commerce. Clark mentioned congressional testimony that discrimination in restaurants restricted interstate travel by African Americans: “One can hardly travel without eating.” He reasoned that such discrimination likewise deterred skilled professionals from moving into areas where such practices occurred. If viewed in isolation, discriminatory practices at this single restaurant would appear to have an insignificant impact on interstate commerce. However, if other “similarly situated” restaurants engaged in such practices, the cumulative effect would impose “a substantial economic effect on interstate commerce.” Congress could regulate this apparently local business because it had a “rational basis” for concluding that racial discrimination in restaurants has a “direct and adverse effect on the free flow of interstate commerce.” Justices Hugo Black, William O. Douglas, and Arthur Goldberg wrote separate concurring opinions. The Supreme Court permitted Congress to use its substantial powers to regulate interstate commerce in the battle against racial discrimination practiced by private parties. This ruling, along with the Court’s decision in Heart of Atlanta Motel v. United States, helped end lingering segregation in the southern United States by enabling legislation to be enforced. Joseph A. Melusky Further Reading A detailed account of the passage and implementation of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 can be found in Robert D. Loevy’s The Civil Rights Act of 1964: The Passage of the Law That Ended Racial Segregation (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1997). See also Civil Rights Act of 1960; Civil Rights Act of 1964; Civil Rights Act of 1968; Heart of Atlanta Motel v. United States; Patterson v. McLean Credit Union; Voting Rights Act of 1965

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Kerner Commission Identification: Federal government commission charged with investigating the origins of civil unrest in American cities Date: Formed in July, 1967 Place: Washington, D.C. The Kerner Commission’s report portrayed a nation divided along racial lines and recommended a plethora of antidotes to cure the maladies of hatred and violence besetting American society. The National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders, also known as the Kerner Commission, was appointed by President Lyndon B. Johnson as an immediate response to racial disorders in American cities during the summer of 1967. The most devastating riots occurred in Newark and Detroit, within a two-week period in July. President Johnson established the commission to try to discover what had happened, why it had happened, and what could be done to prevent it from happening again. Prelude to the Commission Both President Johnson and the commission gave priority to the maintaining of law and order in the affected cities and to determining if a conspiracy had existed that created a chain reaction of riots. It was important to the president and to the members of the commission to uncover the historical factors that caused the riots of 1967. This question provided the commission with the opportunity to focus on systemic problems of racism in American society. The paramount observation of the commission was tersely stated: “Our nation is moving toward two societies, one white, one black—separate and unequal.” President John F. Kennedy, and his brother, Robert F. Kennedy, had shown much compassion in committing the United States to eliminating segregation in schools and public facilities. The Kennedy administration was short-lived, but it did inspire a helpful political mood for government action against the more conspicuous forms of racism. President Johnson, as Kennedy’s successor, pledged to continue the battle for civil rights for members of minorities.

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In July, 1967, President Johnson appointed the commission, giving it a mandate to investigate the origins of the recent disorders in American cities. The president pledged to use national resources to remedy historical racism and social injustice. In typical folksy prose, President Johnson beseeched Americans to pray for the day when “mercy and truth are met together; righteousness and peace have kissed each other.” He pledged to work for better jobs, housing, and education for black Americans. Members of the Commission and Their Work Otto Kerner, the governor of Illinois, was selected by President Johnson to chair the National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders. John V. Lindsay, the mayor of New York City, was appointed vice chair. The other members represented a crosssection of American politics, leaning toward moderates. Exceptions to this tendency were Roy Wilkins, Executive Secretary of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) and Fred Harris, U.S. senator from Oklahoma, whose work on behalf of Native Americans had sensitized him to the pains of racism. A starting point for the commission was to examine racism in its historical framework. The causes of the 1967 riots, concluded the report issued by the commission in February, 1968, were in-

President Lyndon B. Johnson (below bust of Abraham Lincoln) convenes the first meeting of the Kerner Commission in 1967. (National Archives)

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herent in the structure and dynamics of American society which established the pattern of interracial relations. Black Americans had always struggled for equality in law and in social life. Some African Americans, particularly at the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth, supported separatism and self-help. Black Power proponents of the 1960’s, such as Stokely Carmichael and H. Rap Brown, revitalized this philosophy, originally championed by Booker T. Washington. Black Power supporters were actually promoting many of the objectives of white racism through their emphasis on black history, separatism, and racial solidarity, the commission noted. In the early years of the twentieth century, a group of African Americans had organized to challenge Booker T. Washington’s program of political accommodation to white racism. Washington was convinced that African Americans could earn the respect of white society through hard work. Political rights, such as the franchise, could wait for an undetermined future date. W. E. B. Du Bois and William Monroe Trotter began and led the Niagara Movement, which rejected separatism, condemned Jim Crow laws, and took up protest and agitation for racial equality in law and in social life. The Niagara group placed the responsibility for black poverty and violence on white racism and demanded the abolition of all distinctions based on race and color. National Association for the Advancement of Colored People Booker T. Washington fought back. He had the support of southern whites and many conservative northern philanthropists who wanted to preserve the racial status quo. Nevertheless, Washington failed to subdue Du Bois and his followers. In 1909 and 1910, Du Bois was able to enlist a small group of white liberals, some of whom could trace their ancestry back to the abolition movement of the nineteenth century, and socialists to form the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. Du Bois became the editor of The Crisis, a semiofficial journal of the NAACP which was adamant in its condemnation of white racism and in its demand for full equality for African Americans. The NAACP aimed its protest against the whole nation, insisting on the right to vote, equal protection under the law, equal pay

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for equal work, and the dismantling of segregation in public accommodations, in schools, and in the armed forces. A variety of tactics was used by the NAACP, including boycotts, publicizing lynching (while pressing for antilynching legislation) and other atrocities against African Americans, and bringing lawsuits. It was in these early years that the NAACP prepared the groundwork for Brown v. Board of Education (1954), with cases pertaining to white colleges and universities and their refusal to admit African Americans to their graduate and professional schools. In 1936, Thurgood Marshall, counsel for the NAACP, successfully contested before the courts the exclusion of African Americans from the law school at the University of Maryland. Two years later, the Supreme Court declared unconstitutional a Missouri plan that banned African Americans from the University of Missouri law school as violating the “separate but equal” doctrine. The Commission’s Findings The federal government ignored the plight of African Americans in northern cities and in the countryside of the southern states. Southern congresspeople, in fact, were able to expand de facto segregation in the District of Columbia, although they failed to enact Jim Crow laws. The nation’s capital became another bastion and an important symbol of Jim Crowism and the subordination and segregation of African Americans in virtually every segment of society. White prejudice and the frequent use of extralegal violence, violence often sanctioned by the larger community, by whites against African Americans who broke social or political norms were principally responsible for black riots in the twentieth century. White racism, according to the commission’s report, created a pattern of failures among African Americans. The commission referred to pervasive racism and segregation, black migration from the South to the North, and the black ghettos, implicating white institutions for creating the ghettos. The commission urged the American people to commit themselves to the elimination of the ghettos through massive and sustained action, backed by the will and resources of the richest nation on earth.

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The goals of society, according to the commission, needed to focus on creating a single American identity, a single society in which race and color would not determine a person’s dignity or limit the choice of job, residence, or even partner in marriage. To reach these goals, the commission recommended the elimination of all forms of racial segregation in the United States by giving to African Americans the right to choose their jobs, where they would live, and what schools they would attend. The commission proposed the formation of grassroots institutions based in the ghettos and in rural areas, thereby making government more responsive to citizens on the local level. The commission insisted on destroying not merely the legal status of racism but also the legacy of racism by devising an array of programs to integrate American society. Impact of the Commission’s Report The assault by the National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders on institutionalized racism was a comprehensive proclamation which indicted white racism while condemning black violence and committing the nation to build a single, non-racial society. The impact of the commission’s report was felt by African Americans and members of other minorities in many ways. Black Americans in general, but especially the young, began to see the federal government as compassionate and committed to eradicating legal and de facto racism throughout America. In the area of employment, the commission proposed a comprehensive program to meet the needs of the unemployed and the underemployed through active recruitment, job training, affirmative action in the public and private sectors, and stimulating public and private investment in poverty-stricken areas, both in the cities and in rural communities. The commission recommended the creation of two million jobs through a combination of government and private efforts over a three-year period. Education in a democratic society is necessary to provide citizens with the capacity to participate in the political process and to enjoy fully the fruits of their collective endeavors. Schools in the northern ghettos and segregated schools in the South and West had failed to discharge their obligations to educate African

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Americans adequately. The commission recommended scores of reforms to remedy this failure. Many of the rioters in 1967, the commission observed, were high school dropouts. It also cited the disparity in educational achievement between black and white children in the same grades. Public schools were not teaching black children basic verbal skills. The commission cited results of the Selective Service Mental Test showing that during the period between June, 1964, and December, 1965, 67 percent of black candidates but only 19 percent of whites failed the examination. To rectify the failure to educate African Americans and members of other minorities, the commission supported the elimination of de facto school segregation, which was connected with residential segregation in the North; increased funding for schools in the inner-cities; improving community-school relations; greater expenditures on early childhood education; enforcement of Title VI of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, which prohibited giving federal financial aid to any program which discriminated against African Americans; yearround education for disadvantaged students; and expanded opportunities for higher education and vocational training for African Americans and other disadvantaged groups. The commission made other comprehensive proposals, addressing almost every conceivable segment of social life. It recommended a national system of income supplements, eliminating discrimination in housing, the construction of smaller housing projects (that is, “scattering”) to break-down racial isolation, an expansion of the rent supplement program and an ownership supplement program, and the opening up of areas outside ghetto neighborhoods to black occupancy. Many of the commission’s recommendations became law. Its greatest impact, however, was perhaps in beginning the process of attaining racial equality. Claude Hargrove Further Reading Clark, Kenneth Bancroft. Dark Ghetto: Dilemmas of Social Power. New York: Harper & Row, 1965. Describes the psychology of racial inferiority and self-hatred of African Americans. The author shows how the larger society shapes and warps the ghetto.

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____________. Negro Protest. Boston: Beacon Press, 1963. Views of three leading figures in the civil rights struggle are given: Martin Luther King, Jr., Malcolm X, and James Baldwin. An interesting ideological contrast among the three is provided. Finch, Minnie. The NAACP: Its Fight for Justice. Metuchen, N.J.: Scarecrow Press, 1981. Attention is given to the legal struggles of the NAACP from its inception through the 1960’s. Franklin, John Hope. From Slavery to Freedom. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1947. A recounting of Negro history from 1619 to the twentieth century. The author, unfortunately, concentrates on too many trifles. Franklin, Robert Michael. Liberating Visions: Human Fulfillment and Social Justice in African American Thought. Minneapolis, Minn.: Fortress Press, 1990. W. E. B. Du Bois’s vision of African Americans stood the test of time. This brilliant, though often unsuccessful, agitator and conscience of the nation is described here. Harlan, Louis. Booker T. Washington: The Making of a Black Leader, 1856-1901. New York: Oxford University Press, 1972. Washington is depicted as paternalistic and self-centered. His philosophy is presented as convoluted. Washington himself is portrayed as more interested in controlling his empire than in battling segregation. Rose, Arnold Marshall. An American Dilemma: The Negro in America. New York: Harper & Row, 1948. This work shocked America by unabashedly condemning American racism and exposing its hypocrisy. This was an important work in shaping American sociology in the post-World War II era. Wilkins, Roy. Standing Fast: The Autobiography of Roy Wilkins. New York: Viking Press, 1982. Wilkins is an articulate and consistent advocate of racial equality. He gives much insight into many of the major triumphs of the NAACP, especially its Legal and Educational Fund. Woodward, C. Vann. The Strange Career of Jim Crow. New York: Oxford University Press, 1955. Explodes the myths of a gentle and benign South following Reconstruction. The author revises history to tell the truth about segregation and racism in the United States.

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See also Chicago riots; Los Angeles riots; Miami riots; Newark riot

Keyes v. Denver School District No. 1 The Case: U.S. Supreme Court ruling on school integration and busing Date: June 21, 1973 In its first school desegregation case involving a major city outside the South, the Supreme Court held that a district-wide busing plan was an appropriate remedy for a situation in which official policies had encouraged the establishment of racially segregated schools in any section within the district. Decided June 21, 1973, this ruling outlawed de facto desegregation and expanded prohibitions on segregation. Brown v. Board of Education (1954) invalidated laws that required or permitted segregated black and white schools. Nevertheless, many school districts remained segregated, in part because of de facto segregation (segregation “in fact” rather than de jure, or “by law”). Wilfred Keyes did not want his daughter, Christi Keyes, to attend any kind of segregated school in Denver. In 1970, when a newly elected school board rescinded a desegregation plan adopted by the previous board in 1969, he brought a class-action suit. In 1970, the district court ordered Park Hill schools desegregated after hearing evidence that the school board deliberately segregated its schools through school site selection, excessive use of mobile classroom units, gerrymandered attendance zones, student transportation routes, a restrictive transfer policy, and segregated faculty assignment to schools. Keyes was also successful before the court in arguing that inner-city schools, with substantial black and Hispanic student populations, should also be desegregated, but Denver prevailed on appeal in 1971, arguing that the large percentages of black and Hispanic students in these schools resulted from a “neighborhood school” policy. Justice William J. Brennan delivered the opinion of the U.S. Supreme Court. Six justices joined Brennan, one justice affirmed the

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decision in part and dissented in part, and the remaining justice dissented. The Supreme Court ruled that since intentional segregation was proved in one part of the city, there was a presumption of intentional discrimination in the other case. The burden of proof thus shifted to the school board to prove that the intentional segregation of one section of the district was isolated, separate, and unrelated to the pattern of pupil assignment to the “core city schools.” When the case was sent back to the district court in 1973, Denver was determined to have practiced unlawful segregation in both areas of the city, and the school board was required to desegregate. When the school board failed to design an adequate plan to desegregate by 1974, the court drew up a plan of its own. The effect of Keyes was to open all northern school districts to the possibility of desegregation lawsuits. Eventually almost every city of at least moderate size then grappled with desegregation plans, voluntary or court ordered. The lone exception is the statewide school district of Hawaii, which has never been desegregated despite the existence of schools situated to serve certain geographic areas where only persons of Hawaiian ancestry by law can reside. Michael Haas See also Brown v. Board of Education; Gerrymandering; Segregation; Sweatt v. Painter

King assassination The Event: Murder of civil rights leader Martin Luther King, Jr. Date: April 4, 1968 Place: Memphis, Tennessee Martin Luther King, Jr.’s sudden death virtually guaranteed congressional passage of the 1968 Civil Rights Act providing for open housing, legislation that King had long supported. That act was the last major civil rights legislation of the era. The Civil Rights movement of the 1950’s and 1960’s proved to be one of the most consequential social and political episodes in

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American history. Dedicated activists effectively worked to eliminate racial barriers that had denied millions of black people basic citizenship rights in the Jim Crow South. The movement produced numerous leaders, but none was more identifiable than Martin Luther King, Jr., a highly educated and articulate Baptist minister from Atlanta, Georgia. For more than a decade, his name was synonymous with the struggle for civil rights in the United States. King, a charismatic figure, encountered little difficulty in rallying support around his causes and leadership style. Influenced by the teachings of Morehouse College president Benjamin Mays, India’s Mohandas K. Gandhi, and the German philosopher Friedrich Hegel and by the social gospel of Walter Rauschensbusch, he developed a protest philosophy that blended religion with issues of justice, human and civil rights, and a vision of an ideal American society. King and the Civil Rights Movement King was the Civil Rights movement’s greatest exponent of nonviolent mass civil disobedience. He rose to national prominence in 1955 as the leader of the Montgomery (Alabama) Improvement Association’s boycott against the city’s racially segregated bus line. Black passenger Rosa Parks precipitated the boycott with her arrest for refusing to surrender her seat to a white rider. The boycott successfully desegregated the buses. It also helped initiate a period of mass protest that not only challenged southern segregation and black disfranchisement but also influenced human rights issues in foreign countries. Many of the subsequent campaigns that affected southern life were led by King through his own Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC). An occasional failure, such as the SCLC’s 1961-1962 Albany, Georgia, initiative to eliminate segregation ordinances and discriminatory hiring practices, did not discourage King. A foray in Birmingham, Alabama, in the spring of 1963 produced more tangible results. King, ably assisted by Ralph Abernathy, his closest friend and handpicked SCLC successor, resolved to change downtown hiring practices and to escalate the pace of court-ordered desegregation in schools and public facili-

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ties. Unlike in Albany, King employed the tactic of passive resistance with telling effect, as the demonstrators defied local law and taxed the patience of police chief Eugene “Bull” Connor. On national television news, Americans watched with abhorrence the acts of police brutality against the protesters, many of whom were children; they were similarly outraged over King’s and Abernathy’s solitary confinement in the Birmingham jail. The demonstrations eventually helped to win major advances for black Birmingham residents. King utilized the Birmingham campaign to raise the national consciousness about the morality of civil rights causes. In the process, he enhanced his own prestige and leadership position. That stature was further strengthened by his August 28, 1963, “I Have a Dream” speech during the March on Washington campaign. Addressing 250,000 persons assembled at the Lincoln Memorial as well as a national television audience, King expressed his continuing faith in America’s ideals. Speaking in his characteristic rhythmic cadence, he stirred the nation with his “dream” of an America free of racial prejudice and bigotry. The address was perhaps King’s finest hour as an orator. King continued to garner national and international acclaim for his work. By the end of 1964, he had won Time magazine’s prestigious Man of the Year award and had been honored as a Nobel Peace Prize recipient. Both recognitions further solidified his position as the preeminent U.S. leader in the struggle for African American civil rights. King’s Crusade Continues Sensitized national leaders reacted to King’s and other black leaders’ efforts with concrete legislation. The comprehensive 1964 Civil Rights Act outlawed discrimination and segregation in key aspects of American life. In the same year, King’s Selma, Alabama, campaign for black voting rights provoked savage white police reaction against demonstrators similar to that in Birmingham. Congress responded to incidents in Selma and to black voting demands with an extensive law effectively enfranchising black southerners, the 1965 Voting Rights Act. Before 1965, King had confined his civil rights activities pri-

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Martin Luther King, Jr. (Library of Congress)

marily to the segregated South. Such efforts, however, did not preclude a concern for oppressed people worldwide. Almost from the outset of his activism, he linked America’s black struggle to human rights issues elsewhere, particularly in Africa. He spoke boldly against South African apartheid and supported the move to end colonialism across the continent. His attendance at Ghana’s independence celebrations in Ghana in 1957 and Nigeria in 1960 helped to endear him to citizens of those emerging Third World nations. Increasingly after 1965, King’s attention turned to opposing America’s Vietnam involvement and to the problems of African Americans and poor urbanites in northern cities. These initiatives produced considerably less than the desired results. His antiwar stance cost him important white northern support, and his efforts in cities such as Chicago won African Americans few substantive gains in better housing and employment. Nevertheless, King’s internationalism and his inclusion of human rights and economic justice in a broadened civil rights agenda inspired plans for a major campaign to encourage massive federal spending to fight poverty

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rather than support war. He would not, however, have the opportunity to lead this ambitious Poor People’s March on Washington. Memphis, Tennessee King’s urban concerns took him to Memphis, Tennessee, in the early spring of 1968. His purpose there was to support striking municipal sanitation workers seeking recognition of their recently formed union. A demonstration planned on their behalf for March 28, 1968, ended violently when youthful members of a local black gang fought with police and vandalized stores along the route. Discouraged, King canceled the demonstration and promised to return to lead another march that would adhere to his nonviolent philosophy. In the late evening of April 4, 1968, several days before the scheduled second march, King was mortally wounded by a sniper while standing on the balcony near his room at Memphis’s Lorraine Hotel. King’s meteoric rise to international prominence clearly had not occurred without challenges and personal dangers. A 1958 stabbing in New York by a mentally disturbed black woman had made clear the grave risks that accompanied public stature and recognition. It was the nature of his activism that provoked the greatest opposition and made him a logical target of racial extremists. King was acutely aware of this; death threats and bomb scares constantly reminded him of it. An emotional speech to a church audience the night before his assassination was so interspersed with veiled references to dying that it makes credible his aides’ suggestions that King saw his death as imminent. If King readily envisioned his own death, it seemed not to trouble his lieutenants. They, too, fully understood the dangers inherent in his role, but they had witnessed his preoccupation with death before and were not overly concerned with his latest mood. King’s assassination was certainly unexpected, and it generated a range of emotions from close associates, but few of them seemed truly surprised that such an event could happen. After one of the nation’s most intensive manhunts ever, James Earl Ray, an escaped Missouri felon with decidedly antiblack racial views, was captured, tried, convicted, and sentenced to life imprisonment for King’s murder. In many black communities,

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however, suspicion surfaced that Ray did not act alone. Long after the trial, charges were rampant of a King conspiracy that implicated the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). No conspiracy evidence was ever substantiated in King’s murder, however. Impact of King’s Assassination The reaction to King’s death was universal. The international community memorialized him and recognized his impact on human rights developments beyond the United States. American leaders praised his commitment to nonviolence and acknowledged his role in influencing many of the social and political changes affecting American life, especially in the South. Even King’s militant rivals lamented his passing and predicted dire national social consequences because of it. Such predictions resulted largely from the violence that the assassination triggered in many American communities. Rioting struck Memphis almost immediately, as black youths vented their anger and frustration over yet another fallen symbol. In Washington, leaders pleaded for calm, but the national capital and 130 other cities could not be spared from violent disturbances in the emotional wake of the assassination. The disorders caused forty-six deaths and property damage exceeding $100 million. This violent response hardly represented the vast black majority, who memorialized King in more traditional and peaceful ways. Nevertheless, the consequences of the riots were farreaching. King’s death virtually assured congressional passage of the 1968 Civil Rights Act providing for open housing, legislation that King had long supported. That act was the last major civil rights legislation of the era. A growing conservative white backlash concerned about law and order stiffened its resolve against further minority demands. Civil rights leaders seemed unable to reverse the trend. Before King died, the movement had already splintered badly over the issues of nonviolence and Black Power. It continued to founder after his death. Historians have debated whether King and his enlarged agenda of human rights, economic justice, and international peace could have stemmed the reversal, but his SCLC suc-

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cessor could not. Despite renewed fears of violence, in June, 1968, Abernathy led King’s Poor People’s Campaign in Washington peacefully; however, it accomplished little. Lacking both King’s charisma and his leadership qualities, Abernathy soon fell from power and sank into relative obscurity. King was not the first leader-activist felled by white racism. In the five-year period before his death, America had anguished over the loss of several others, including Medgar Evers, James Chaney, and Viola Liuzzo. To many African Americans, however, King was not merely another beloved figure victimized by racism. For most, he embodied their hopes and aspirations to enjoy the full benefits of American citizenship. He spoke for them, articulating their demands in a way that, it seemed, only he could. In life, he symbolized the black struggle, and in the years following his death no leader emerged who was capable of mobilizing the masses as he did. In death, King’s image became even more powerful, taking on new meaning and symbolism. In the nation’s cumulative memory of King’s work and vision, he was transformed from martyr to virtual demigod. A U.S. national holiday was declared to honor his life, and annual King celebrations were inaugurated in several West African countries. Long after his death, he continued to represent the idealism of the 1950’s and 1960’s civil and human rights struggle. Robert L. Jenkins Further Reading Abernathy, Ralph D. And the Walls Came Tumbling Down: An Autobiography. New York: Harper & Row, 1989. A controversial memoir of King’s dearest friend and civil rights associate. It gives a good account of the inside strategies and operations behind the SCLC’s campaigns. It is particularly valuable for its revealing portrait of the nonpublic part of King’s life. Pictures, appendix, and index. Ansbro, John J. Martin Luther King, Jr.: The Making of a Mind. Maryknoll, N.Y.: Orbis Books, 1982. An interesting study of King’s nonviolent resistance strategy that examines doctrines and insights of the many thinkers who influenced him. In

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some ways, this study criticizes King as a person who appropriated the ideas of others. Includes references and index. Bishop, Jim. The Days of Martin Luther King, Jr. New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1971. Written for a popular audience, this readable volume is primarily the story behind King’s assassination and the responses of those close to him. Includes a bibliography and index. Branch, Taylor. Parting the Waters: America in the King Years, 19541963. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1988. A comprehensive study dealing with an important period of King’s life. This prize-winning book is superbly written and is especially valuable because of its focus on King from the context of his origins in the larger black religious culture, a base from which other civil rights leaders also originated. Includes notes and index. ____________. Pillar of Fire: America in the King Years, 1963-65. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1998. Burns, Stewart. To the Mountaintop: Martin Luther King, Jr.’s Sacred Mission to Save America, 1955-1968. New York: HarperSanFrancisco, 2004. Frank, Gerold. An American Death: The True Story of the Assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., and the Greatest Manhunt of Our Time. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1972. The subtitle suggests this volume’s basic content. The book is valuable for its extensive research and coverage of James Earl Ray and his trial and for Frank’s attempts to answer the questions that suggested a conspiracy in King’s murder. Includes notes and index. Garrow, David. Bearing the Cross: Martin Luther King, Jr., and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. New York: William Morrow, 1986. This massive book comes from the scholar who has most thoroughly studied King and his civil rights role. A Pulitzer Prize winner, the volume ends rather abruptly with King’s death. It has vast references and an extensive bibliography. King, Coretta Scott. My Life with Martin Luther King, Jr. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1969. An intimate account of the Kings’ life together. It depicts the impact of King’s work on the leader himself and on his family. Pictures and a useful index. King, Martin Luther, Jr. Why We Can’t Wait. New York: New American Library, 1964. One of several books authored by

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King. It provides his personal prescription for progress in the civil rights struggle. Considered a classic by King scholars, it includes his protest and reform philosophy and is an appropriate beginning for understanding King’s thoughts and motivations. Ling, Peter J. Martin Luther King, Jr. New York: Routledge, 2002. Miller, William Robert. Martin Luther King, Jr.: His Life, Martyrdom, and Meaning for the World. New York: Weybright and Talley, 1968. This book appeared in the immediate aftermath of King’s death. The title suggests much about Miller’s presentation. It contains sound conclusions about King’s legacy. Bibliography and index. Oates, Stephen B. Let the Trumpet Sound: The Life of Martin Luther King, Jr. New York: Harper & Row, 1982. The work of an accomplished biographer, this study is comprehensive, absorbing, and well written but notably reverent of its subject. Oates taps previously unused sources. Contains references and an index. Pepper, William F. An Act of State: The Execution of Martin Luther King. New York: Verso, 2003. ____________. Orders to Kill: The Truth Behind the Murder of Martin Luther King. New York: Carroll & Graf, 1995. Posner, Gerald. Killing the Dream: James Earl Ray and the Assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. New York: Random House, 1998. See also Chisholm’s election to Congress; Civil Rights movement; Civil rights worker murders; Congress of Racial Equality; “I Have a Dream” speech; Malcolm X assassination; Montgomery bus boycott; Southern Christian Leadership Conference; Till lynching

King beating case The Event: Arrest and beating by police of Rodney King, a black man, that sparked a major investigation of police brutality in Los Angeles Date: 1991-1994

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Violent race riots occurred after a California court acquitted the police officers involved in the Rodney King beating. The riots affected areas throughout Los Angeles but particularly devastated parts of impoverished South Central Los Angeles. Following a high-speed chase along a Los Angeles highway that ended just after midnight on March 3, 1991, California Highway Patrol officers Timothy Singer and Melanie Singer stopped driver Rodney Glen King and his two passengers, Bryant Allen and Freddie Helms, for questioning. More than twenty Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD) officers soon arrived on the scene in Los Angeles’s Lake View Terrace neighborhood. Police sergeant Stacey Koon, assisted by officers Theodore Briseno, Laurence Powell, and Timothy Wind, took over the investigation. The police quickly subdued and handcuffed Allen and Helms without incident. Their encounter with King, however, caused a controversy with far-reaching legal and social consequences. King’s Arrest According to the four white police officers who arrested King, a black man, King refused at first to leave the car and then resisted arrest with such vigor that the officers considered it necessary to apply two jolts from a Taser electric stun gun, fifty-six blows with aluminum batons, and six kicks (primarily from Briseno) to subdue King before they successfully handcuffed and cordcuffed King to restrain his arms and legs. The event probably would have gone unnoticed had not George Holliday, an amateur cameraman who witnessed the incident, videotaped the arrest and sold the tape to a local television station news program. The videotape became the crucial piece of evidence that the state of California used to charge the four LAPD arresting officers with criminal assault and that a federal grand jury subsequently used to charge the officers with civil rights violations. Broadcast of Holliday’s tape on national news programs elicited several responses from the LAPD. On March 6, 1991, the LAPD released King from custody and admitted that officers failed to prove that King had resisted arrest. On March 7, Los An-

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geles police chief Daryl Gates announced that he would investigate King’s arrest and, if the investigation warranted it, would pursue criminal assault charges against the arresting officers. On March 14, a Los Angeles County grand jury indicted Sergeant Koon and officers Briseno, Powell, and Wind for criminal assault, and they subsequently pleaded not guilty. Investigation of Police Brutality Overwhelming public sympathy for King following the national broadcast of Holliday’s videotape prompted Los Angeles mayor Thomas Bradley to investigate charges that instances of police brutality motivated by racism were commonplace during LAPD arrest operations. On April 1, 1991, Mayor Bradley appointed a nonpartisan commission, headed by Warren Christopher (who had formerly served as President Jimmy Carter’s deputy secretary of state), to study the LAPD’s past record of complaints regarding police misconduct. On April 2, Mayor Bradley called on Police Chief Gates, who had served on the LAPD since 1949 and had been police chief since 1978, to resign. In May, the LAPD suspended Sergeant Koon and officers Briseno and Powell without pay and dismissed officer Wind, a rookie without tenure, pending the outcome of their criminal trial. King then filed a civil rights lawsuit against the city of Los Angeles. Several significant developments occurred as the officers awaited trial. On July 9, 1991, the Christopher Commission released the results of its investigation and its recommendations to the five-member Los Angeles Police Commission. The Police Commission employed the police chief and was responsible for the management of the LAPD. The Christopher Commission found that the LAPD, composed of 67.8 percent white officers in 1991, suffered from a “siege mentality” in a city where 63 percent of the population were people of color. The commission also found that a small but significant proportion of officers repeatedly used excessive force when making arrests and that the LAPD did not punish those officers when citizens filed complaints. Finally, the commission recommended measures to exert more control over the LAPD’s operations, including limiting the

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police chief’s tenure to a five-year term, renewable by the Police Commission for one additional term only. After the release of the Christopher Commission report, Police Chief Gates announced his retirement, effective April, 1992 (which he later amended to July, 1992). On July 23, 1991, a California court of appeal granted the police defendants’ request for a change of venue for the upcoming criminal trial. The State Criminal Trial The trial of the four officers began on March 4, 1992, in the new venue—the primarily white community of Simi Valley in Ventura County. The jury who heard the state of California’s case against the four officers consisted of ten whites, one Latino, and one Asian. The officers’ defense lawyers presented Holliday’s videotape broken down into a series of individual still pictures. They asked the jury to judge whether excessive force— that is, force that was not warranted by King’s “aggressive” actions—was employed at any single moment during the arrest. Referring often to the “thin blue line” that protected society from the “likes of Rodney King,” the defense built a case that justified the police officers’ actions. King’s lawyer, Steven Lerman, a personal injury specialist, advised King not to testify at the trial out of concern that King’s “confused and frightened” state of mind since the beating might impair his memory of events and discredit his testimony. The Simi Valley jury acquitted the four officers of all charges of criminal assault, with the exception of one count against officer Powell on which the jury was deadlocked. The acquittal of the four police officers on April 29, 1992, ignited widespread and destructive riots led by poor and angry black Angelenos. The riots affected areas throughout Los Angeles but particularly devastated parts of impoverished South Central Los Angeles. Fifty-three people died during the riots, which raged until May 2, and more than one billion dollars’ worth of property was damaged. There had long been friction between Los Angeles’s neighboring Korean and black communities, and the Korean American community bore the brunt of the rioters’ destructive attacks.

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The Federal Civil Rights Trial On August 5, 1992, a federal grand jury indicted the four officers for violating King’s civil rights. The grand jury charged Sergeant Koon with violating the Fourteenth Amendment, which obligated Koon, as the officer in charge of the arrest, to protect King while he was in police custody. Officers Briseno, Powell, and Wind were charged with violating the Fourth Amendment in using more force than necessary, and using that excessive force willfully, when they arrested King. King testified during the federal trial. On April 17, 1993, a jury of nine whites, two African Americans, and one Latino found Koon and Powell guilty and Briseno and Wind not guilty. On August 4, 1993, Koon and Powell were sentenced to two-and-one-half-year prison terms. In May, 1994, a Los Angeles jury awarded King $3.8 million in compensatory damages in his civil rights lawsuit against the city, but on June 1, 1994, the jury denied King’s request for additional punitive damages. Karen Garner Further Reading For accounts of the Rodney King incident that are sympathetic to King, see H. Khalif Khalifah, ed., Rodney King and the L.A. Rebellion: Analysis and Commentary by Thirteen Best-Selling Black Writers (Hampton, Va.: U.B. & U.S. Communications Systems, 1992), and Tom Owens with Rod Browning, Lying Eyes: The Truth Behind the Corruption and Brutality of the LAPD and the Beating of Rodney King (New York: Thunder’s Mouth Press, 1994). For an account of the police officers’ point of view, see Stacey Koon with Robert Deitz, Presumed Guilty: The Tragedy of the Rodney King Affair (Washington, D.C.: Regnery Gateway, 1992). For a collection of essays that places the Rodney King incident in the context of race relations in the United States, see Robert Gooding-Williams, ed., Reading Rodney King/Reading Urban Uprising (New York: Routledge, 1993). See also Harlins murder; Koreans and African Americans; Los Angeles riots; Miami riots; MOVE bombing; Race riots of the twentieth century; Simpson murder trial

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Koreans and African Americans Korean immigrants to the United States have tended to open small businesses, such as groceries, in central areas of American cities, where many of their customers have been African Americans. The cultural gap between African Americans and Korean Americans has resulted in a number of well-publicized clashes. Ownership of small businesses is the most common occupation of people of Korean ancestry in the United States. Assisted by rotating credit associations (organizations that Koreans form to grant each other interest-free business loans requiring little collateral), Korean Americans have specialized in self-employment in small stores. The majority of Korean businesses in the United States are located in California and New York. In 1990, according to the U.S. Bureau of the Census, 44 percent of all Korean business owners lived in California and 12 percent of Korean business owners lived in New York. Within these states, they were concentrated in the Los Angeles-Long Beach area and in New York City. Korean Businesses Korean businesses are most often located in central areas of cities. During the 1970’s and 1980’s, owners of inner-city businesses began to leave, and Koreans, having access to business loans from their rotating loan associations but few job opportunities in established American businesses, began buying small urban shops. Although their businesses were in the city, the Koreans tended to settle in the suburbs. The people who do live in central urban areas and make up the majority of the customers of Korean businesses are African Americans. Korean shop owners are often looked upon by their inner-city customers as exploiters who come into neighborhoods to make a profit on the people and then take the money elsewhere. These customers complain about high prices, poor merchandise, and discourteous treatment. As new arrivals to the United States, Korean merchants sometimes have trouble with English and do not communicate well with those who come into their shops.

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Korean businesspeople tend to hire other Koreans to work in their shops. Most of these shops are family enterprises, so family members frequently provide labor. Koreans not only live outside the communities where their stores are located but also hire few people who live in those communities. African Americans complain that Korean merchants do not hire black employees, do not buy from black suppliers of goods, and do not invest in the black neighborhoods in which they have located their businesses. Although African American shoppers frequently view Koreans as outsiders and exploiters, the Koreans sometimes look with suspicion on those living in the neighborhoods where their businesses are located. Having little understanding of the history of U.S. racial inequality, Korean business owners may see lowincome urban residents as irresponsible and untrustworthy. The high crime rates in these neighborhoods can lead them to see all members of the communities, even the most honest, as potential shoplifters or robbers. Mistrust and Culture Clash The cultural gap between African Americans and the Korean Americans who often own stores in black neighborhoods has resulted in a number of well-publicized clashes. In the spring of 1990, African Americans in Brooklyn began a nine-month boycott of Korean stores after a Korean greengrocer allegedly harassed an African American shopper. In 1992, trouble flared up again in the

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same neighborhood when an African American customer in a Korean grocery was allegedly harassed and struck by the owner and an employee. During 1995, an African American man was arrested while attempting to burn down a Korean-owned store, and both white and Korean store owners in Harlem received racial threats. California, home to the nation’s greatest number of Korean businesses, has seen some of the most serious conflicts between Koreans and African Americans. In April of 1992, a judge gave a sentence of probation to a Korean shopkeeper convicted in the shooting death of a fifteen-year-old African American girl, Latasha Harlins. Two weeks after that, on April 29, riots broke out in South Central Los Angeles after the acquittal of police officers who had been videotaped beating an African American motorist, Rodney King. Although none of the police officers was Korean, Korean groceries and liquor stores in South Central Los Angeles became targets of the riots. The riots destroyed more than one thousand Korean businesses and an estimated twenty-three hundred Korean-owned businesses were looted. Korean shop owners began leaving South Central Los Angeles in the years after the riots. Those who remained became even more wary of the local population than they were previously. Efforts at Improving Relations Korean and African American leaders have made efforts to improve relations between the two groups. In the days following the riots in Los Angeles, some African American and Korean leaders formed the Black-Korean Alliance to improve communication and find common ground. In New York, the KoreanAmerican Grocer’s Association has tried to find ways of bringing African Americans and Koreans together. These have included sending African American community leaders on tours of South Korea and providing African American students with scholarships to Korean universities. It may be difficult to resolve the problems between Korean merchants and their African American customers as long as American central cities continue to be places of concentrated unemployment and poverty. Investment in low-income communi-

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ties and the creation of economic opportunities for their residents are probably necessary in order to overcome the suspicion and resentment between members of these two minority groups. Carl L. Bankston III Further Reading Claire Jean Kim’s Bitter Fruit: The Politics of Black-Korean Conflict in New York City (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000) examines the boycott of Korean stores in New York. In Patrick D. Joyce’s No Fire Next Time: Black-Korean Conflicts and the Future of America’s Cities (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2003), Koreans in the Hood: Conflict with African Americans (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999) edited by Kwang Chung Kim, and Caught in the Middle: Korean Merchants in America’s Multiethnic Cities (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996) by sociologist Pyong Gap Min, the situation of Korean businessmen in U.S. cities is examined. Nancy Abelmann and John Lie discuss the consequences for Koreans of the 1992 Los Angeles riots in Blue Dreams: Korean Americans and the Los Angeles Riots (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1995). Ivan Light and Edna Bonacich give a history of Korean American business in Immigrant Entrepreneurs: Koreans in Los Angeles, 1965-1982 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988). Lauren Lee’s Korean Americans (New York: Marshall Cavendish, 1995) provides a readable, in-depth description of this ethnic group. See also Harlins murder; King beating case; Los Angeles riots

Ku Klux Klan Identification: White supremacy organization Date: Founded in 1866 Place: Pulaski, Tennessee A collection of generally loosely organized bands of white supremacists, the Ku Klux Klan grew from an organization made up of white southerners disaffected by the outcome of the Civil War to a violent organization of institutionalized race hatred.

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With the end of the Civil War and the emancipation of African American slaves in the South, tension arose between old-order southern whites and Radical Republicans devoted to a strict plan of Reconstruction that required southern states to repeal their black codes and guarantee voting and other civil rights to African Americans. Federal instruments for ensuring African American rights included the Freedmen’s Bureau and the Union Leagues. In reaction to the activities of these organizations, white supremacist organizations sprouted in the years immediately following the Civil War: the Knights of the White Camelia, the White League, the Invisible Circle, the Pale Faces, and the Ku Klux Klan (KKK). Beginnings The last of these would eventually lend its name to a confederation of such organizations, but in 1866 it was born in Pulaski, Tennessee, as a fraternal order for white, male, AngloSaxon Protestants joined by their opposition to Radical Reconstructionism and an agenda to promote white, southern dominance. This incarnation of the Klan established many of the weird rituals and violent activities for which the KKK became known throughout its history. They named the South the “invisible empire,” with “realms” consisting of the southern states. A “grand dragon” headed each realm, and the entire “empire” was led by Grand Wizard General Nathan B. Forrest. Positions of leadership were dubbed “giant,” “cyclops,” “geni,” “hydra,” and “goblin.” The white robes and pointed cowls stem from this era; these were donned in the belief that African Americans were superstitious and would be intimidated by the menacing, ghostlike appearance of their oppressors, who thus also maintained anonymity while conducting their activities. Soon the Klan was perpetrating acts of violence, including whippings, house-burnings, kidnappings, and lynchings. As the violence escalated, Forrest disbanded the Klan in 1869, and on May 31, 1870, and April 20, 1871, Congress passed the Ku Klux Klan Acts, or Force Acts, designed to break up the white supremacist groups.

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Second Rise of the Klan The next rise of the Klan presaged the period of the Red Scare (1919-1920) and the Immigration Act of 1921, the first such legislation in the United States to establish immigration quotas on the basis of national origin. In November, 1915, on Stone Mountain, Georgia, a second Ku Klux Klan was founded by preacher William J. Simmons, proclaiming it a “high-class, mystic, social, patriotic” society devoted to defending womanhood, white Protestant values, and “native-born, white, gentile Americans.” Such an image of the Klan was perpetrated by the popular 1915 film Birth of a Nation, in which a lustful African American is shown attempting to attack a white woman, and the Klan, in robes and cowls, rides to the rescue. The new Klan cloaked itself as a patriotic organization devoted to preserving traditional American values against enemies in the nation’s midst. An upsurge of nationalist fervor swelled the ranks of the Klan, this time far beyond the borders of the South. This second Klan adopted the rituals and regalia of its predecessor as well as the same antiblack ideology, to which it added anti-Catholic, anti-Semitic, anti-immigrant, anti-birthcontrol, anti-Darwinist, and anti-Prohibition stances. Promoted by ad-man Edward Y. Clarke, its membership reached approximately 100,000 by 1921 and over the next five years, by some estimates, grew to 5 million, including even members of Congress. The second Klan perpetrated more than five hundred hangings and burnings of African Americans. In 1924, forty thousand Klansmen marched down Pennsylvania Avenue in Washington, D.C., sending a message to the federal government that there should be a white, Protestant United States. Finally, the Klan’s growing wave of violence alienated many of its members, whose numbers dropped to about 30,000 by 1930. Klan activities increased again prior to World War II, and membership rose toward the 100,000 mark, but in 1944 Congress assessed the organization more than a half million dollars in back taxes, and the Klan dissolved itself to escape. Two years later, however, Atlanta physician Samuel Green united smaller Klan groups into the Association of Georgia Klans and was soon joined by other reincarnations, such as the Federated Ku Klux Klans, the

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Hooded klansmen meeting in Chicago in 1924. (Library of Congress)

Original Southern Klans, and the Knights of the Ku Klux Klan. These groups revived the agenda of previous Klans and were responsible for hundreds of criminal acts. Of equal concern was the Klan’s political influence: A governor of Texas was elected with the support of the Klan, as was a senator from Maine. Even a Supreme Court justice, Hugo L. Black, revealed in 1937 that he had been a member of the Ku Klux Klan. Challenges In the 1940’s, many states passed laws that revoked Klan charters, and many southern communities issued regulations against masks. The U.S. Justice Department placed the Klan on its list of subversive elements, and in 1952 the Federal Bureau of Investigation used the Lindbergh law (one of the 1934 Crime Control Acts) against the Klan. Another direct challenge to the principles of the KKK came in the 1960’s with the advent of the Civil Rights movement and civil rights legislation. Martin Luther King, Jr., prophesied early in the decade that it would be a “season of suffering.” On September 15, 1963, a Klan bomb tore apart the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama, killing four children. Despite the outrage of much of the nation, the violence continued, led by members of the Klan who made a mockery of the courts and the laws that they had broken. Less than a year after

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the bombing, three civil rights workers were killed in Mississippi, including one African American and two whites from the North involved in voter registration. This infamous event was later documented in the motion picture Mississippi Burning. Viola Lee Liuzzo was killed for driving freedom marchers from site to site. Such acts prompted President Lyndon B. Johnson, in a televised speech in March, 1965, to denounce the Klan as he announced the arrest of four Klansmen for murder. After the conviction of many of its members in the 1960’s, the organization became somewhat dormant, and its roster of members reflected low numbers. Still, as it had in previous periods of dormancy, the Klan refused to die. Busing for integration of public schools in the 1970’s engendered Klan opposition in the South and the North. In 1979, in Greensboro, North Carolina, Klan members killed several members of the Communist Party in a daylight battle on an open street. Klan members have also patrolled the border with Mexico, where, armed with weapons and citizens-band radios, they have tried to drive illegal immigrants back to Mexico. The Klan has been active in suburban California, at times driving out African Americans who attempted to move there. On the Gulf Coast, many boats fly the infamous AKIA flag, an acronym for “A Klansman I Am,” a motto that dates back to the 1920’s. Klan members have tried to discourage or run out Vietnamese fishers. Klan leaders active since 1970 include James Venable, for whom the Klan became little more than a hobby, and Bill Wilkinson, a former disciple of David Duke. Robert Shelton, long a grand dragon, helped elect two Alabama governors. Duke, a Klan leader until the late 1980’s, decided to run for political office and was elected a congressman from Louisiana despite his wellpublicized past associations; in 1991, he ran for governor, almost winning. In the 1980’s the Klan stepped up its anti-Semitic activities, planning multiple bombings in Nashville. Klan leaders in the 1990’s have trained their members and their children for what they believe is an imminent race war, learning survival skills and weaponry at remote camps throughout the country. A major blow was struck against the Klan by the Klanwatch Project of the Southern Poverty Law Center, in Montgomery, Ala-

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bama, when, in 1984, attorney Morris Dees began pressing civil suits against several Klan members, effectively removing their personal assets, funds received from members, and even buildings owned by the Klan. As late as 2005, the Ku Klux Klan continued to solicit new “Aryan” members and even maintained a Web site for this purpose. However, in contrast to the organization’s traditional image, it now stressed a different message: The Imperial Klans of America Knights of the Ku Klux Klan are a legal and law abiding organization that will NOT tolerate illegal acts of any sort. If you take it upon yourself to violate the law, you do so on your own. If you commit an illegal act it will result in your membership with the IKA to be on suspension and you may be banished. We cannot and will not be responsible for any member committing any illegal acts.

Further Reading Tyler Bridges’s The Rise of David Duke (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1994) is a thorough discussion of a notorious Klan member. David Mark Chalmers’s Hooded Americanism: The History of the Ku Klux Klan (New York: F. Watts, 1981) is considered the bible of books about the Klan. Raphael Ezekiel’s The Racist Mind: Portraits of American Neo-Nazis and Klansmen (New York: Viking Press, 1995) explores conditions of childhood, education, and other factors in an attempt to explain racist behavior. Bill Stanton’s Klanwatch: Bringing the Ku Klux Klan to Justice (New York: Weidenfeld, 1991), by a former Klanwatch director, explains initiatives to disable the Klan, most of which have been effective. Wyn Draig Wade’s The Fiery Cross: The Ku Klux Klan in America (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1987) recounts the Klan’s history and episodes of violence. See also Black codes; Church bombings; Civil Rights Acts of 1866-1875; Disfranchisement laws in Mississippi; Dyer antilynching bill; Film history; Freedmen’s Bureau; Freedom Summer; Jim Crow laws; Ku Klux Klan Acts; Lynching; Race riots of 1866; Reconstruction; White Citizens’ Councils

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Ku Klux Klan Acts The Laws: Three federal laws designed to suppress white supremacist terrorism during Reconstruction Date: Enacted in 1870-1871 Enacted by the U.S. Congress in response to the terrorist activities of the Ku Klux Klan and other white supremacy groups in the South during Reconstruction, the three Ku Klux Klan Acts were effective in repressing white supremacy organizations. Also known as the Enforcement Acts, or Force Acts, these three laws were enacted by the U.S. Congress in response to the terrorist activities of the Ku Klux Klan and other groups committed to white supremacy in the South during the era of Reconstruction, immediately following the Confederate defeat at the end of the Civil War. The first act, passed in May, 1870, made night riding (the practice of riding on horseback at night and committing various acts of intimidation and harassment) a federal felony and reaffirmed the rights of African Americans provided for in the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments. Congress passed a second act in February, 1871, which provided for election supervisors to ensure against fraud and racial discrimination. Two months later, Congress approved a third statute aimed specifically at the activities of the Ku Klux Klan. This law made it a federal offense to violate anyone’s voting rights. In addition, it allowed the president to proclaim areas in which state governments failed to curb domestic violence to be in “rebellion” and authorized the use of military force and the suspension of the writ of habeas corpus to end rebellions. In October, 1871, President Ulysses S. Grant used the law to declare nine counties in South Carolina to be in rebellion. These laws proved effective in suppressing white supremacy organizations. Thomas Clarkin See also Fifteenth Amendment; Fourteenth Amendment; Ku Klux Klan; Reconstruction

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Lassiter v. Northampton County Board of Elections The Case: U.S. Supreme Court ruling on the right to vote Date: June 8, 1959 In this ruling, the Supreme Court upheld the right of the individual states to impose literacy tests for voting. An African American challenged a state literacy test that applied to voters of all races. The Supreme Court did not infer that the test was being used to discriminate against members of minorities and unanimously upheld the state law. In his opinion for the Court, Justice William O. Douglas wrote that states had wide latitude in passing laws establishing conditions for suffrage. This decision would seem to have stood in the way of the 1965 Civil Rights Act, which dispatched federal registrars to southern states that often had used literacy tests as a way to prevent African Americans from voting. The Court avoided that problem by asserting in South Carolina v. Katzenbach (1966) that the pattern of segregation justified special measures under the Fifteenth Amendment. Richard L. Wilson See also Fifteenth Amendment; Fourteenth Amendment; Politics and government; Understanding tests

League of Revolutionary Black Workers Identification: Radical African American labor organization Date: Founded in June, 1969 Place: Detroit, Michigan This organization was formed to fight racism within the United Auto Workers union. The group encompassed the Dodge Revolutionary Union Movement and similar groups.

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In 1967, African American autoworkers at the Detroit-area Dodge main plant formed the Dodge Revolutionary Union Movement (DRUM), a rank-and-file union caucus. DRUM accused both the company and the United Auto Workers (UAW) of racism, citing evidence that the best positions went to whites, while African Americans had the dirtiest, most dangerous jobs. The group charged that the nearly all-white local union leadership perpetuated this system by inadequately addressing the grievances of African American workers. Scores of other “RUMs” formed, including ELRUM at the Eldon Avenue plant, FRUM at the Ford plant, and UPRUM among United Parcel Service workers. The League of Revolutionary Black Workers, founded in June, 1969, acted as their umbrella group. League organizations conducted demonstrations and wildcat strikes in response to unfair working conditions. DRUM believed racism was intentionally cultivated by employers and the union to divide African American, white, and Arab workers (who were numerous in Detroit). League members picketed the UAW International convention and ran against incumbents in union elections. The league gained broad left-wing support, but the UAW responded with red-baiting and called the league’s publications “extremist hate sheets” and its members “black fascists.” The league voiced a powerful critique of racism in the union movement. Strongly influenced by black nationalism and MarxismLeninism, it was one of the most prominent radical labor groups of the 1960’s. Several League activists helped launch the Black Workers Congress in 1970; shortly afterward, the league disintegrated amid internal disputes. Vanessa Tait Further Reading Dan Georgakas and Marvin Surkin’s Detroit, I Do Mind Dying: A Study in Urban Revolution (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1975) recounts the activities of DRUM and the League from their beginnings through the early 1970’s efforts of former League members to challenge racism in Detroit’s police and judicial systems. James A. Geschwender’s Class, Race, and Worker Insurgency: The League of Revolutionary Black Workers (New York: Cambridge University

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Press, 1977) closely chronicles the League’s ideological development and internal divisions. See also Black nationalism; Black Panther Party; Black Power movement; Employment; Race riots of the twentieth century

The Liberator Identification: Weekly newspaper published by abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison Date: Published, January 1, 1831-December 29, 1865 Place: Boston, Massachusetts The weekly newspaper The Liberator served as a major vehicle for advocacy of the immediate abolition of slavery. The initial publication of white abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison’s weekly newspaper, The Liberator, in Boston, on January 1, 1831, helped to transform the antislavery movement in the United States. It symbolized the beginning of a radical effort to abolish slavery and secure equal rights for African Americans throughout the country. Garrison and his newspaper were products of the religious revival called the Second Great Awakening, which transformed Protestant theology in the United States. The Awakening engendered moral reform movements in New England and other parts of the North during the early decades of the nineteenth century. Unlike their Calvinist predecessors, those who engaged in moral reform assumed that human beings, by their actions, could create a perfect society and bring about the millennial return of Jesus Christ. In his perception of the sinfulness and criminality of slaveholding, which he believed deprived both slaves and masters of a chance for salvation, Garrison went beyond most of the other reformers of his time. Garrison’s Beliefs Garrison was born in Newburyport, Massachusetts, in 1805. Deserted by his seafaring father in 1808, Garrison was raised in

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poverty by his devout Baptist mother, who instilled in him her strict moral code. At thirteen years of age, he apprenticed with a printer at the Newburyport Herald, where he learned the newspaper business. By 1828, he was in Boston as the editor of The National Philanthropist, advocating the temperance movement. Garrison also supported what he and others perceived to be the antislavery efforts of the American Colonization Society (ACS), founded in 1817. As the dominant antislavery organization of the 1820’s, the ACS advocated the gradual abolition of slavery, combined with the colonization of free black Americans in Africa. It was Garrison’s decision, later in 1828, to join Quaker abolitionist Benjamin Lundy in Baltimore as coeditor of Lundy’s weekly newspaper, The Genius of Universal Emancipation, that led to The Liberator and a more radical antislavery movement. In Baltimore, Garrison observed slavery in practice. Influenced by members of Baltimore’s African American community, Garrison came to believe that gradualism would never end the “peculiar institution.” African American influences also led Garrison to conclude that the ACS perpetuated a racist assumption that black and white people could not live together as equals in the United States. Garrison’s increasing militancy made cooperation with the more conservative Lundy difficult. Garrison’s radicalism also led to his imprisonment for libel in the Baltimore jail and to his decision to return to New England to begin his own antislavery newspaper. Garrison Makes a Statement In the first issue of The Liberator, Garrison proclaimed his conversion to immediate abolitionism. Harshly condemning slaveholders as sinners and thieves, he pointed out that one did not ask sinners to stop sinning gradually or require that thieves gradually stop committing crimes. Christian morality and justice, he insisted, required that slaveholders immediately and unconditionally free their bondspeople. Garrison was not the first to advocate immediate emancipation. What was significant was his rejection of moderation and his linkage of immediatism with a demand that the rights of the

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formerly enslaved be recognized in the United States. In his most famous statement, Garrison proclaimed, “I am in earnest—I will not equivocate—I will not excuse—I will not retreat a single inch—AND I WILL BE HEARD.” The initiation of The Liberator also is significant for its reflection of biracial cooperation in the antislavery movement. Although Garrison, like other white abolitionists, never entirely escaped the racial prejudices of his time, he and his newspaper enjoyed the strong support of African Americans. Wealthy black abolitionist James Forten of Philadelphia provided crucial financial support to The Liberator in its early years. During the same period, Garrison employed black subscription agents, and three-quarters of the newspaper’s subscribers were black. In Boston, where white antiabolition sentiment could produce violent confrontations, Garrison enjoyed the physical protection of African Americans. The Paper’s Effects Meanwhile, Garrison and The Liberator played an essential role in the formation of the American Anti-Slavery Society (AASS). Founded in December, 1833, under the leadership of Garrison

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and New York City businessmen Arthur and Lewis Tappan, the AASS united immediate abolitionists in the United States during most of the 1830’s. Reflecting the pacifistic views of Garrison, the Tappans, and others, the society pledged in its Declaration of Sentiments (modeled on the Declaration of Independence) to use peaceful means to bring about the immediate, uncompensated emancipation of all U.S. slaves, without colonization. Promoted by The Liberator, dozens of other antislavery newspapers, and thousands of antislavery pamphlets, the AASS grew exponentially. By 1838, it had a membership in the North of approximately one-quarter million and as many as 1,350 local affiliates. By the late 1830’s, however, internal tensions were tearing the AASS apart. The essential problem was that Garrison and his closest New England associates, including Maria Weston Chapman, Wendell Phillips, and Henry C. Wright, had concluded that the spirit of slavery had so permeated the nation that the North— not just the South—had to be fundamentally changed. Although other abolitionists were reaching similar conclusions in the late 1830’s, many of them objected to the specific policies advocated in the columns of The Liberator to effect those changes. In particular, an increasingly unorthodox Garrison antagonized church-oriented abolitionists by his wholesale condemnation of organized religion. He also seemed to threaten traditional concepts of patriarchy by his championing of women’s rights and, specifically, female equality within the AASS. He appeared to threaten government through his advocacy of nonresistance, the pacifist doctrine that physical force is never justified, even in self-defense or on behalf of law and order. He frustrated those who desired a separate abolitionist political party by condemning political parties as inherently corrupt. As a result, the abolitionist movement splintered in 1840. Garrison, his New England associates, and a few others across the North retained control of the AASS, but the great majority of abolitionists left the organization. Lewis Tappan began the American and Foreign Anti-Slavery Society, which, until 1855, maintained a church-oriented antislavery campaign. Politically inclined abolitionists organized the Liberty Party. By the 1850’s, a majority of non-Garrisonian abolitionists had come to support the Republi-

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can Party, which advocated neither immediate abolition nor equal rights for African Americans. In the 1840’s and 1850’s, Garrison, in The Liberator and elsewhere, continued to promote anticlericalism, women’s rights, and nonresistance, as well as immediate emancipation and equal rights for African Americans. Although he and his former AASS colleagues remained in agreement on many points, there was also considerable mutual antagonism. Chances for reconciliation among them diminished in 1842, when Garrison began to call on the people of the North to dissolve the Union. He argued that it was northern support that kept slavery in existence in the South, implying that, when the North withdrew its support through disunion, the slaves could free themselves. His abolitionist critics responded that disunion was tantamount to the North’s exculpating itself from the slavery issue. When the South, rather than the North, initiated disunion in 1860 and 1861, however, changing circumstances caused Garrison to draw back from some of his more radical positions. He compromised his pacifism and his opposition to party politics by supporting Republican president Abraham Lincoln’s war to preserve the Union and free the slaves. When the war ended successfully for the North and slavery was formally abolished, Garrison, old, tired, and seeking vindication, announced that his work was done—although it was clear that black equality had not been achieved with the end of slavery. The last issue of The Liberator rolled off its press on December 29, 1865. Stanley Harrold Further Reading Robert H. Abzug’s Cosmos Crumbling: American Reform and the Religious Imagination (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994) demonstrates Garrison’s radicalism in the context of early nineteenth century U.S. Protestantism. Lawrence J. Friedman’s Gregarious Saints: Self and Community in American Abolitionism, 18301870 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1982) includes a description of Garrison’s circle of abolitionists and his leadership style. Aileen S. Kraditor’s Means and Ends in American Abolitionism: Garrison and His Critics on Strategy and Tactics, 1834-1850

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(New York: Vintage Books, 1970) is a probing analysis of Garrison’s tactics in comparison with those of other abolitionists. Walter M. Merrill’s Against Wind and Tide: A Biography of William Lloyd Garrison (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1963) is the most detailed biography of Garrison to date. James Brewer Stewart’s William Lloyd Garrison and the Challenge of Emancipation (Arlington Heights, Ill.: Harlan Davidson, 1992) explores the personal choices that initiated and maintained Garrison’s career as an abolitionist. John L. Thomas’s The Liberator: William Lloyd Garrison, a Biography (Boston: Little, Brown, 1963) portrays Garrison as a romantic individualist who defied authority for psychological reasons. See also Abolition; American Anti-Slavery Society; Free African Society; National Council of Colored People; North Star, The; Proslavery argument; Turner’s slave insurrection

Literature In the eighteenth century, the African American presence in the United States added a new dimension to the cultural identity of American literature. African Americans first wrote about their experiences as slaves; later, they infused new perspectives into the literary canon through experimentation and through revisions of existing conventions. Personal accounts of slaves’ journeys to and bondage in the United States produced a new genre, the slave narrative, in the eighteenth century. The genre borrows from the autobiography, travelogue, and captivity narratives that were already common forms of writing among the early settlers. While most Puritans and pilgrims expressed faith in their God and hope in their journey to a new land, the African American narratives convey extremes of alienation and suffering. Slave Narratives Among the pioneer African American writers of slave narratives is Gustavus Vassa, who narrates his experiences in the

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United States. His account, titled The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, or Gustavus Vassa, the African, Written by Himself (1789), contains a description of the terrible journey by sea. Although African Americans came from diverse regions of Africa, slaves were perceived as members of a single race, so their diversity of heritage was overlooked and their regional differences were ignored by slave owners, who defined them in terms of their functions. From 1830 to 1865, with the exception of one poet, James H. Whitfield, all black authors wrote autobiographies or were subjects of biographical works. Scenes in the Life of Harriet Tubman (1869, revised as Harriet the Moses of Her People, 1886) is the biography of a runaway slave who became a conductor on the Underground Railroad; at great risk to her life, she assisted slaves in fleeing to the northern states and freedom. The most famous African American in the antislavery movement was Frederick Douglass. He wrote three autobiographies during various phases of his life. He reports his early interest in learning how to read and write, his confrontation with his inhumane owners, and his ultimate freedom. Dedicated to a vision of transforming the oppressed state of his race, Douglass shared his story to inspire others. Biographical Narratives After the Civil War (1861-1865), biographical narratives remained a popular genre among African American writers. These narratives integrate the art of storytelling and history telling and allow the authors to address the theme of racial discrimination within personalized contexts of economic and social challenges. The autobiography of Booker T. Washington, Up from Slavery: An Autobiography (1901), is a personal testimony of success that is in many ways comparable to Benjamin Franklin’s famous autobiography. As a native son of Virginia, Washington realized the importance of education. Washington became an advocate of the development of practical and technical skills; many of his African American opponents criticized him for his excessive loyalty to whites in a laboring capacity.

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W. E. B. Du Bois is another black author who was concerned about the survival of African Americans in America; he advocated democratic rights for his race. He was conscious of the diversity among African American cultural experiences. Unlike Washington, who was born a slave, Du Bois was born free and grew up in the cosmopolitan culture of Massachusetts. He attended Fisk University in Nashville, Tennessee, then went to Harvard and was graduated magna cum laude. He recorded impressions of his complex experiences in The Souls of Black Folk (1903). In this work, he makes a case for a racial bond among African Americans despite their varied backgrounds. He explains that Washington’s advice in Up from Slavery stems from his rural agrarian background; however, the future of the African American race called for a more uniform approach to democratic rights. Du Bois was aware of the psychological tensions linked to segregation; therefore, he predicted the color line would be the problem of the twentieth century. He advocated that the talents and skills of African Americans must not be developed in contempt for other races, but rather in conformity to the greater ideals of the American republic. He proposed that double consciousness or pride in African heritage and pride in American citizenship was better than a divided self. There was no need for African Americans to seek assimilation in America at the cost of their African heritage. Some African Americans resorted to collaborative writing for biographical narrative. An example is The Autobiography of Malcolm X (1964), written in collaboration with Roots author Alex Haley. It blends the dramatic conventions of narration with firstperson reporting. The book captures America’s cultural landscape of the 1950’s and 1960’s, while highlighting the turning points in Malcolm X’s life. The biography records his criminal activities, prison experiences, and conversion to the Nation of Islam. After his release from prison, Malcolm X’s pilgrimage to Mecca led to the realization that the message of religion is to foster peaceful relations among all races. Therefore, upon his return to the United States, he renounced his allegiance to Elijah Muhammad, who was preaching hatred toward the white race.

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Malcolm X remained active in the struggle for equality of African Americans and became a popular black leader; he was assassinated in 1965. Poetry African American writers have used the genres of poetry and fiction to express their identity. Folk literature became a vehicle for blending the reality of their experiences in America with their nostalgia for the African past. Slaves were not allowed formal education and were generally perceived as unfit for intellectual activities. Only a few slaves had their owners’ permission to read and write, and their literacy centered on the reading and interpretation of the Bible. Among such privileged and literate slaves was the first African American poet, Phillis Wheatley (1753?-1784), who was known as “a sable muse” among European educated circles. Wheatley faced the dual challenge of writing as an African American and as a woman. She blended the literary conventions of her time, such as heroic couplets, with innovative zeal. In many of her elegies, she addresses the subject of death in the metaphorical context of Christian hope for salvation, implying rescue from a state of bondage. It was her love of liberty that prompted her to write the poem “To His Excellency General Washington” for leading the forces of independence. Unfortunately, poverty and domestic hardship squelched her poetic voice. Wheatley’s literary work was primarily accepted as testimony of African American ability to participate in American literature. The poetry of Paul Laurence Dunbar (1872-1906) captures the African American voice in American literature. Dunbar’s mixed use of oral and written conventions was also practiced by realists such as Mark Twain. It is not surprising that a renowned realist writer, William Dean Howells, praised Dunbar for integrating the African American voice into literature. Harlem Renaissance The 1920’s marked the beginning of the Harlem Renaissance, when African American writers transcended the constraints of

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Phillis Wheatley, from the frontispiece of a collection of her poems published in 1773. (Library of Congress)

the European tradition to infuse an independent perspective into American literature. The Harlem Renaissance produced powerful works of poetry by, among others, Langston Hughes, who claims ties to the grandeur of ancient civilization through his African heritage and depicts the ravages of social and economic disparity. A recurrent theme to appear in the fiction of African American writers is the identity of the mulatto in relation to an environment of rejection. African American fiction treats such rejection as a lingering social phenomenon. Toward the end of the nineteenth century novelist Pauline E. Hopkins addressed racism in her serial novels, exposing the hypocrisy within race relationships. Hopkins’s fiction is prophetic in the sense that, as did Du Bois, she saw that the problem of the color line would be the great problem of the twentieth century. Later, Jean Toomer’s collection of short fiction, Cane (1923), embraced the tensions of segregation and victimization of the mulatto from the male perspective. He makes powerful use of folk sound, imagery, and symbol to portray racial barriers that signal that a claim to an interracial heritage is a social taboo.

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Novels The Harlem Renaissance allowed for novels that captured the reality of African American experience. Richard Wright’s novel Native Son (1940) remains a masterpiece that portrays the fate of a black man who is overpowered by economic oppression. The protagonist accidentally kills the liberal daughter of his employer. Wright pursues the prevailing conventions of naturalism to depict the helpless condition of African Americans. His novel resembles Theodore Dreiser’s An American Tragedy (1925): Both writers were inspired by real trials. In response to Wright’s fiction, there were some black writers who were not interested in depicting merely the helpless condition of the black man; they were also interested in probing the challenges and complexities of African American experience to understand their own cultural identity in America. Among the leading male novelists who focus on the quest for identity is Ralph Ellison, who wrote Invisible Man (1952). This novel combines realism with surrealism and draws upon black folklore and myth. James Baldwin was another African American novelist who investigated the archetypal theme of initiation and discovery of self in his novel Go Tell It on

Toni Morrison, the first African American writer to win the Nobel Prize in Literature. (Alfred A. Knopf)

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the Mountain (1953). This novel draws heavily upon the author’s childhood experiences. A contemporary leading black male novelist is Ishmael Reed. In his novel Mumbo Jumbo (1972), Reed experiments with the conventions of fiction to capture the complexity of African American identity as he integrates multiple layers of meaning in his prose. He parodies Western tradition and African American conventions. Reed decries any idealism that imposes unrealistic restrictions on the artist. Among those African American writers whose style Reed parodies is Zora Neale Hurston, who grew up in the black community of Eatonville. Her work marks a major breakthrough for feminist literature. For example, in her novel Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937), she combines the voice of self-expression with the social challenges encountered by African American women. The Hurston legacy matures in Alice Walker’s fiction. Walker uses a self-reflective voice in her epistolary novel The Color Purple (1982). Probably the most memorable female African American voice in the twentieth century is that of Toni Morrison. In Beloved (1987, made into a film in 1998) she takes an innovative approach to a ghost story. She traces the historical context of slavery and exposes the hazards of allowing the past to override the present. Mabel Khawaja Further Reading George Hutchinson’s The Harlem Renaissance in Black and White (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1995) is a valuable addition to the literature on the Harlem Renaissance. Claudia Tate’s Black Women Writers at Work (New York: Continuum, 1983) surveys feminist African American scholarship and provides fifteen interviews with leading black women writers. Houston Baker’s Modernism and the Harlem Renaissance (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987) claims that the Harlem Renaissance liberated African American authors from traditional literary constraints. Henry Louis Gates’s The Signifying Monkey: A Theory of Afro-American Literary Criticism (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988) examines the influence of African

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folk tradition and the revisionist trends in African American literature. Toni Morrison’s Playing in the Dark (New York: Vintage Books, 1990) criticizes the perspective of critical theory that treats African American presence in literature from a fixed viewpoint and disregards the symbiotic interracial relationships. See also Film history; Harlem Renaissance; Music; Roots; Stereotypes

Little Rock school desegregation crisis The Event: Crisis in federal-state relations arising from the refusal of Arkansas state officials to comply with a court order to allow African American students to enroll in Little Rock’s Central High School Date: 1957-1959 Place: Little Rock, Arkansas The widely publicized events in Little Rock made school desegregation a nationally recognized issue and gave momentum to the early Civil Rights movement. On May 17, 1954, in the case of Brown v. Board of Education, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that racially segregated public schools were illegal. The court issued a second ruling on the case one year later, ordering local school boards to desegregate “with all deliberate speed.” One of the first and most widely publicized tests of the new federal position on school segregation came in Little Rock, Arkansas. At first, it appeared as if Little Rock schools would quietly follow the orders of the Supreme Court. On May 22, 1954, the Little Rock school board announced that it would comply with the Supreme Court order as soon as the Court established a method and a schedule for desegregation. In May 1955, the school board voted to adopt a policy of gradual desegregation to start in 1957. Under the plan devised by School Superintendent Virgil Blos-

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som, the city would first integrate its Central High School and then gradually integrate lower grades. The Crisis Erupts The crisis broke out in 1957, the year that the school board had hoped to manage the quiet enrollment of a few African American pupils in white schools. Seventeen students were selected to be the first to break down the racial lines, but only nine of them decided to pursue enrollment. Shortly before the beginning of the school year, on August 27, the Little Rock’s Mother’s League sought an injunction to halt integration. The injunction was granted by Pulaski County chancellor Murray Reed, but it was rejected three days later by federal district judge Ronald Davies. The enrollment of the African American students might have proceeded in a relatively peaceful manner if Arkansas governor Orval Faubus had not used the event for political advantage. Faubus was searching for political support to win a third term in office, and he decided to appeal to white constituents who were eager to preserve segregation. Governor Faubus declared that he would not be able to maintain order if Central High School were integrated, and on September 2, he ordered the state’s National Guard to surround the school. His stand drew public attention to the situation and attracted white segregationist mobs to the streets. The next day, Judge Davies ordered that the integration of Central High should continue. The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), under the local leadership of Daisy Bates, organized the nine African American students to arrive in a group. They were met by National Guardsmen who turned them away with bayonets. One of the students arrived after the others and was confronted by screaming segregationists. Television, which occupied a central place in most American homes by 1957, broadcast the scenes from Little Rock around the nation. On September 20, Judge Davies ruled that Governor Faubus had used the National Guard to prevent integration and forbade the guard’s employment in this way. Faubus then replaced the guard with local police. The nine black students entered Central High School

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Angry whites gather to protest against the integration of Little Rock’s Central High School. (Library of Congress)

through a side door on September 23. As they made their way into the school, an unruly mob of more than one thousand people massed on the streets outside. Federal Intervention President Dwight D. Eisenhower met with Governor Faubus on September 14. The president believed that the governor had agreed to allow school integration to continue. It soon became evident that Governor Faubus had no such intention. Alarmed by the developments in his city, on September 24, Little Rock mayor Woodrow Mann asked President Eisenhower for federal troops to maintain order. Eisenhower responded by sending one thousand troops of the 101st Airborne Division and placing the Arkansas National Guard under federal control. The troops then escorted the nine students to the school each day. Some Americans were shocked to see that military protection was needed to protect the basic rights of citizens. Others were disturbed at what they believed was a federal military occupation of a state, reviving historical memories of the military occupation of the South during the era of Reconstruction in the years following the Civil War.

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Years of Struggle The struggle continued even after the mobs in front of Central High returned to their homes and jobs. On February 8, 1958, after several angry confrontations with white students, one of the nine, Minnijean Brown, was suspended for the rest of the year. Shortly after, the school board asked the federal court for a delay of the integration order until the concept of “all deliberate speed” was defined. The delay was granted in June and reversed in August. In the meantime, the first African American student graduated from Central High in May. Upon the opening of the 1958-1959 school year, Governor Faubus ordered Little Rock public schools closed, and white students enrolled in private schools and in other districts. On September 27, 1958, Little Rock residents voted on school integration and overwhelmingly rejected it. However, on June 18, 1959, a federal court declared that Little Rock’s public school closing was unconstitutional. Little Rock schools opened one month early for the 1959-1960 school year and enrolled both African American and white students. The Little Rock crisis was the first major test of the federal government’s determination to enforce the Supreme Court’s Brown decision. President Eisenhower’s willingness to use troops for school desegregation was controversial, but it marked the beginning of the U.S. government’s commitment to desegregated schools. Little Rock was also the beginning of a series of struggles over school desegregation that continued for several decades across the nation. The event proved to be one of the defining events during the early Civil Rights movement. Carl L. Bankston III Further Reading Counts, Ira Wilmer. A Life Is More than a Moment: The Desegregation of Little Rock’s Central High. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1999. Provides essays and photographs concerning the events at Central High. Huckaby, Elizabeth. Crisis at Central High: Little Rock, 1957-1958. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1980. The crisis as recounted by one of the original African American students.

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Kirk, John A. Redefining the Color Line: Black Activism in Little Rock, Arkansas, 1940-1970. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2002. Draws on the oral histories of important grassroots civil rights activists who shaped the critical events in Little Rock. See also Bolling v. Sharpe; Brown v. Board of Education; Civil Rights Act of 1957; Civil Rights movement; Civil Rights movement and children; Congress of Racial Equality; Cooper v. Aaron; “I Have a Dream” speech; Montgomery bus boycott; National Association for the Advancement of Colored People; School desegregation; Southern Manifesto; Swann v. Charlotte-Mecklenberg Board of Education; University of Mississippi desegregation; White Citizens’ Councils

Los Angeles riots The Event: Acquittal of four police officers charged with police brutality that sparked the worst violence in the city’s history Date: April 29-May 1, 1992 Place: Los Angeles, California The riots in Los Angeles following the Rodney King beating trial caused more damage and spread across a wider area than those of the 1960’s. Before the Rodney King beating on March 3, 1991, many in the Los Angeles community believed that the Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD) had demonstrated a pattern of excessive force, particularly against minority groups. One significant example was Operation Hammer, begun in 1989, during which the LAPD allegedly rounded up African Americans and Hispanics without probable cause that they had committed a crime, simply because of the way the suspects looked and because the police wanted to avert the threat of gang violence. As a result, the chief of the LAPD, Daryl Gates, was despised by many in the African American community. The videotape of Rodney King’s beating by members of the LAPD, therefore, came as no surprise to the African American community of Los Angeles. It merely confirmed what they already thought: that police brutality and use of

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excessive force against members of minorities was a common practice. The Beating of Rodney King The videotape, recorded by private citizen George Holliday in the morning hours of March 3, 1991, contained eighty-one seconds of footage. The footage that was seen throughout the United States was of King, a six-foot, three-inch African American weighing 225 pounds, prone on the ground, sustaining blows to his head, neck, kidney area, and legs from four policemen, who were kicking and smashing at him with their truncheons. Not in full view on the videotape were nineteen other police officers surrounding the four who were administering the beating. Also not in view were the onlookers who were pleading that the beating stop. The police paid no attention to them. As a result of the beating, King sustained eleven fractures to his skull, a crushed cheekbone, a broken ankle, internal injuries, a burn on his chest, and some brain damage. Television viewers also did not see what preceded the beating. During the evening, King had consumed the equivalent of a case of beer. His blood alcohol level was twice the legal limit. He was on parole at the time and ran the risk of landing back in jail if he were caught speeding. Police started chasing King as he sped through the streets of Los Angeles. The chase escalated to one hundred miles per hour at one point, before the police were able to stop King and force him out of his car. Nor did television viewers see King fighting with the police, even standing up after being stunned twice with a Taser gun. People saw only the prone body of an African American man being assaulted repeatedly by white police officers. The Trial Four of the officers, including Stacey Koon, were charged with the beating at the end of March, 1991, in Los Angeles. Their attorneys moved for a change of venue for the trial, which was granted. The trial was held in the spring of 1992 in Simi Valley, a suburban town an hour’s drive north of Los Angeles. The town was the home for a large proportion of LAPD officers and retirees and was dominated by law-and-order conservatives. Six men

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and six women, none of whom was African American, made up the jury. According to those who were present, the prosecution presented a weak and diffuse case. The defense, however, was strong. It played the videotape in slow motion over and over until its effect became trivialized. The defense also emphasized how King presented a threat to the police. Koon testified about King’s “hulk-like strength and how he groaned like a wounded animal,” conjuring up for the jury the image of police representing the “thin blue line” that protects the forces of civilization from the savagery represented by King. To those who had likely settled in Simi Valley to get away from the crime of the inner-city, the message resounded. After thirty-two hours of deliberation, on April 29, 1992, the jury acquitted the four officers. The verdict was announced on television at 2:50 p.m. The Riots At 4:00 p.m., in the South Central Los Angeles district near Florence and Normandie Boulevards, five African American gang members went to get some malt liquor at the Payless Liquor Store. They started to take it without paying, and the owner’s son tried to stop them. One of the gang members smashed the son on the head with a bottle and allegedly said, “This is for Rodney King.” Other gang members hurled the bottles they held through the store windows, while the owner pressed the alarm for the police. When two officers came, the suspects were not there. At 5:30, at the corner of Florence and Normandie, eight black men wielding baseball bats started breaking the car windows of passing motorists. Eighteen police cars and thirty-five officers from the LAPD sped to the area. They arrested three suspects but left at 5:45. In the next hour, the crowd attacking cars grew to two hundred people. One of the victims was Reginald Denny, a white truck driver, who was pulled from his truck and beaten by African Americans, including Damien Williams, who wielded a fire extinguisher. The police from the 77th district of the LAPD still stayed away. Chief Gates had left police headquarters at 6:30 to attend a fund-raising event in the affluent suburb of Brentwood. By 7:30, the crowd at Florence and Normandie had started lighting fires. An hour later, the LAPD finally returned to the area

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and began to disperse the crowd. By that time, the fires, rioting, and looting had spread to other parts of the city. The riots continued for two more days; local news coverage flooded the airwaves with helicopter views of hundreds of fires throughout the city and normally law-abiding citizens looting goods from stores. On Friday, May 1, 1992, Rodney King appeared on television with the plea, “Can’t we all get along?” When the riots ended that day in Los Angeles, more than fifty people had died, more than twelve thousand people had been arrested, and the property damage was estimated to be $1 billion. Throughout the nation, uprisings had started in Atlanta, Las Vegas, Minneapolis, New York, Omaha, and Seattle. The riots in Los Angeles following the King trial caused more damage and spread across a wider area than those of the 1960’s. Gates subsequently was replaced by an African American chief of police, Koon and a fellow officer were convicted of violating King’s civil rights in federal court, Williams was acquitted of most of the charges in the beating of Denny, and King won a civil suit against the city of Los Angeles. These actions reinforced the perception of many that the criminal justice system treats whites and African Americans differently, whereas others argued that the riots were less the result of racial tensions than of a widening gap between “haves” and “have-nots” in U.S. society. Jennifer Eastman Further Reading Patrick D. Joyce’s No Fire Next Time: Black-Korean Conflicts and the Future of America’s Cities (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2003), Koreans in the Hood: Conflict with African Americans (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999) edited by Kwang Chung Kim, and Pyong Gap Min’s Caught in the Middle: Korean Merchants in America’s Multiethnic Cities (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996) are all excellent sources for details on the Los Angeles riots. “Can’t We All Get Along?,” “The Fire This Time,” and “Anatomy of an Acquittal” (Time 139, May 11, 1992), give a good overview of the events on April 29, 1992, and following. “Los Angeles, April 29, 1992, and Beyond: The Law, Issues, and Perspectives” (Southern California Law Review 66, May,

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1993) contains a panoply of views on the trial and the riots. “Symposium—The Urban Crisis: The Kerner Commission Report Revisited” (North Carolina Law Review 71, June, 1993) discusses how the riots of 1992 differed from those of the 1960’s. See also Harlins murder; Kerner Commission; King beating case; Koreans and African Americans; Miami riots; Newark riot; Race riots of 1943; Race riots of 1967; Race riots of the twentieth century; Simpson murder trial; Watts riot

Louisville, New Orleans, and Texas Railway Company v. Mississippi The Case: U.S. Supreme Court ruling on the separate but equal doctrine in public accommodations Date: March 3, 1890 The Supreme Court upheld a Mississippi law mandating separate but equal accommodations on a railroad, despite its effect on interstate commerce. By a 7-2 vote, the Supreme Court upheld a Mississippi statute requiring railroads to provide “equal, but separate accommodations” for African Americans and whites. The Louisville, New Orleans, and Texas Railway Company found this expensive and alleged the statute interfered with interstate commerce, but Justice David J. Brewer, who wrote the majority opinion, could see nothing wrong with requiring a railroad to add a car every time it crossed over into Mississippi. Brewer, as typical of the Court in that age, did not even comment on Mississippi’s position that this law affected only intrastate commerce. Justice John Marshall Harlan dissented, maintaining that the state was interfering with the federal government’s right to regulate commerce. Richard L. Wilson See also Plessy v. Ferguson; Segregation; Separate but equal doctrine

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Lynching Definition: Unlawful execution or brutalizing of a person by a mob Although lynching is often associated with hanging someone, lynching includes all types of brutal acts, including flogging, dismemberment, torture, burning, and shooting. It was a primary means used by white supremacists to intimidate and control African Americans in the South. Lynching, the deadliest form of vigilantism, has a long history in America. At the time of the American Revolution, lynchings were used to punish Tories or British sympathizers. Until the 1850’s, lynchings were associated with nonlethal forms of punishment such as beatings and tarring and feathering. In the years immediately before the Civil War, lynching took on its fatal connotation as it was used to suppress slave insurrections. Although lynching is often associated with hanging someone, lynching includes all sorts of violent acts, including flogging, dismemberment, torture, burning, and shooting. History of Lynching After the Civil War, lynching became more widespread as former slaves came to be viewed as a threat by their former slavemasters. Accurate numbers on lynching are hard to come by, and it was not until 1872 that there was a systematic effort to obtain reliable data. Records kept by the Tuskegee Institute indicate that there were 4,743 lynchings in the United States between 1882 and 1968. Of those lynched, 3,446 (73 percent) were African Americans and 1,297 (27 percent) were whites. Even these numbers underestimate what most scholars believe to be the actual number of lynchings. A more accurate estimate would be close to 6,000 lynchings. Lynchings were most prevalent from the 1880’s to the 1920’s. During the last two decades of the nineteenth century, there was an average of 150 lynchings per year, with a high of 230 in 1892. Between 1901 and 1910 there was an average of 85 lynchings per year, and from 1911 to 1920 there was an average of 61 per year.

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Lynchings declined to an average of 28 per year during the 1920’s, to 11 per year during the 1930’s, and to 3 per year during the 1940’s. From 1951 to 1985 a total of 10 lynchings were reported in the United States. Although almost every state experienced lynchings, 82 percent occurred in the South. Mississippi ranks first with 581 lynchings, followed by Georgia with 530 and Texas with 493. Grounds for Lynching Although lynching was often justified as a method of protecting white women from black rapists, only 25 percent of lynching victims were suspected of rape or attempted rape. In most cases, lynching victims were summarily executed before receiving any trial. Their guilt was never established at all, let alone beyond a reasonable doubt. The justification for lynching in the cases of rape was to protect the white woman from the agony of testifying in court. Approximately 40 percent of lynchings involved murder or attempted murder allegations. Nine percent involved assault or robbery charges, certainly not capital offenses, and 2 percent involved African Americans insulting whites, particularly white women. The most famous example of a black man who was lynched for insulting a white woman was Emmett Till. Till, a fourteen-year-old Chicago native, was visiting relatives in Mississippi in 1955. Prodded by some friends, Till asked a white woman for a date. The woman immediately rejected Till and went to get a pistol. Till walked out of the store saying, “Bye, baby,” and “wolf whistled” at her. Till’s actions violated one of the major cultural taboos in the South, and he would pay with his life. That same day, the woman’s husband and her half-brother abducted Till from the home he was visiting. Three days later, Till’s decomposing body was found floating in the Tallahatchie River. Till had been beaten and shot before his weighted-down body was thrown into the river. The two white men who abducted Till were charged with his murder, but it took an all-white jury less than one hour to acquit them.

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Hundreds of festively dressed whites gather near Waco, Texas, to watch a black man brutally killed. (Library of Congress)

The Campaign Against Lynching Few individuals who participated in lynchings were ever prosecuted. Coroners’ juries repeatedly concluded that the death had come “at the hands of parties unknown.” Seldom was anything further from the truth. Often lynchings took on a festive air, and local newspapers provided complete coverage, sometimes including photographs. In the event someone was arrested for the crime, such as the two white men accused of murdering Emmett Till, they would be found not guilty by all-white juries. Leading the effort to abolish lynchings were the Commission on Interracial Cooperation, headed by Will Alexander, and Southern Women for the Prevention of Lynching, led by Jessie Daniel Ames. Ames, one of the leading social reformers in the South, had forty thousand members in her organization within nine years of its establishment in 1930. When alerted about a possible lynching, Ames contacted women in the area who

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were members of her organization or sympathetic to its objectives. One of the earliest objectives of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), a civil rights organization established in 1909, was to pressure the U.S. Congress to pass a federal antilynching bill. On several occasions, the House of Representatives passed such legislation, but it was always filibustered by southern senators when it reached the Senate. In the late 1940’s President Harry S. Truman appointed a President’s Committee on Civil Rights (PCCR). The PCCR urged Congress to pass a federal antilynching law, but without success. The NAACP met with greater success in attempting to mobilize public opinion against lynching. The NAACP investigated lynchings and often sent special investigators into areas where a lynching had occurred. The NAACP prepared written narratives of the lynchings, including photographs if available, and distributed them to any media outlet that would publicize the lynching. The effort was to try to shame the South into stopping this despicable practice. Darryl Paulson Further Reading Among the best studies on lynching are Philip Dray’s At the Hands of Persons Unknown: The Lynching of Black America (New York: Random House, 2002); Ray Stannard Baker’s Following the Color Line: An Account of Negro Citizenship in the American Democracy (New York: Doubleday, Page, 1908); Richard M. Brown’s Strain of Violence: Historical Studies of American Violence and Vigilantism (New York: Oxford University Press, 1977); James Chadbourn’s Lynching and the Law (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1933); Arthur Raper’s The Tragedy of Lynching (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1933); Walter White’s Rope and Faggot (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1929); Stephen Whitfield’s A Death in the Delta: The Story of Emmett Till (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1988); and Robert Zangrando’s The NAACP Crusade Against Lynching, 1909-1950 (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1980).

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See also Clinton massacre; Colfax massacre; Dyer antilynching bill; Film history; Jim Crow laws; Ku Klux Klan; National Association for the Advancement of Colored People; Scottsboro trials; United States v. Cruikshank

McCleskey v. Kemp The Case: U.S. Supreme Court ruling on capital punishment Date: April 22, 1987 The Supreme Court ruled that Georgia’s use of capital punishment was constitutional, despite statistical studies showing that killers of white victims were four times more likely to be executed than killers of African American victims. This case began when Warren McCleskey, an African American, was convicted and sentenced to die for killing a white police officer in an armed robbery in Georgia in 1978. On appeal, his attorneys argued that the state’s death penalty statute was implemented in a racially discriminatory manner, contrary to both the Eighth and Fourteenth Amendments. They emphasized the empirical studies of David Baldus, who demonstrated that the race of the victim was a significant factor in determining whether the defendant would receive the death sentence. Prosecutors had sought the death penalty in 70 percent of the cases involving black defendants and white victims but in only 15 percent of the cases involving black defendants and black victims. Because of the tendency of defendants and victims to belong to the same race, the study found that 4 percent of the black defendants received the death penalty, compared with 7 percent of the white defendants. By a 5-4 margin, the Supreme Court rejected McCleskey’s claim. Justice Lewis F. Powell, Jr.’s opinion for the majority began with the principle that a defendant alleging an equal protection violation had the burden of proving that decision makers in his case had acted “with discriminatory purpose.” McCleskey had presented no evidence that the legislature had enacted or maintained the death penalty to further a racially discriminatory purpose, and the Court had earlier determined, in Gregg v. Georgia

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(1976), that Georgia’s capital sentencing system “could operate in a fair and neutral manner.” Powell expressed concern that if the Court were to invalidate the use of the death penalty on the basis of a statistical disparity that correlated with race, a logical inference would be to question all criminal punishments in which a similar statistical pattern might be found. The four dissenters answered that the death penalty should be judged by standards more rigorous than those used in other sentences. They also found it unacceptable to accept the risk of racial considerations influencing whether a defendant would live or die. Thomas Tandy Lewis See also Fourteenth Amendment; Washington v. Davis

McLaurin v. Oklahoma State Regents for Higher Education The Case: U.S. Supreme Court ruling on separate but equal doctrine Date: June 5, 1950 The Supreme Court overruled a state policy of admitting African Americans to a public university’s graduate program on a segregated basis. In 1938 the Supreme Court held that states must provide equal opportunities for education in legal matters within the borders of the state. George McLaurin, a black teacher who was sixty-eight years old, was admitted to the University of Oklahoma’s graduate program because no other program within the state offered a Ph.D. in education. The Oklahoma legislature passed a statute requiring segregation within all graduate programs that admitted African American students. McLaurin was required to sit at designated desks in classrooms and in the library. By a 9-0 vote, the Court found that such a policy of isolation detracted from McLaurin’s educational experience, in violation of the equal protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. The Court held that after admitting a student to a state university, the state may not

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afford the student different treatment solely because of the person’s race. The McLaurin case was argued and decided simultaneously with a companion case, Sweatt v. Painter (1950). In Sweatt, the Court ruled that a law school for African Americans in Texas was unconstitutional because it did not offer educational opportunities that were substantially equal to those offered to whites. The McLaurin and Sweatt decisions helped prepare the way for Brown v. Board of Education (1954). Thomas Tandy Lewis See also Brown v. Board of Education; Education; Segregation; Separate but equal doctrine

Malcolm X assassination The Event: Murder of a militant spokesman for African American rights Date: February 21, 1965 Place: New York, New York Despite the conviction of three men, conspiracy theories about Malcolm’s death have remained, including theories implicating nonMuslims and even the U.S. government. Perhaps no twentieth century African American leader better expressed the anger and frustrations of urban African Americans than Malcolm X. During the 1960’s Civil Rights movement, Malcolm X, the national spokesman of a black separatist Muslim sect known as the Nation of Islam, articulated in militant language the effects of the nation’s historical pattern of racism against African Americans and the social consequences the country faced if significant change did not occur. Before his assassination in 1965, Malcolm X had come to symbolize the disenchantment of African American ghetto residents, a group who were disillusioned about the benefits of racial integration and becoming increasingly impatient with the dominant nonviolent philosophy of the Civil Rights movement.

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Malcolm’s Early Life Malcolm X was born Malcolm Little on May 19, 1925, in Omaha, Nebraska, to Louise Norton Little and J. Early Little. His father, a Baptist preacher, worked as an organizer for the Universal Negro Improvement Association, the black nationalist organization led by Marcus Garvey. In his later life, Malcolm too would consider himself a black nationalist. In 1931, Malcolm’s father died mysteriously in East Lansing, Michigan, where the family had relocated. Thereafter, Malcolm’s life was marked by a series of crises. The impoverished family, now including Malcolm, his mother, and six siblings, was soon separated: Malcolm’s mother was committed to a mental hospital and no longer influenced his development. Malcolm was placed in a foster home and began to get into trouble as he grew older. Hoping to change the direction of the troubled teen’s life, Ella, an older half sister, brought him to live with her in Boston, Massachusetts. Although he possessed a good mind, he did not find school rewarding and dropped out to work at odd jobs. An attraction to street life overcame his interest in legitimate employment, however, and he gradually gravitated toward hustling, drugs, and petty crime. For a time, Malcolm loved the culture of urban street life and seemed to flourish in it. In the 1940’s, he wore the zoot suit and

Malcolm X. (Library of Congress)

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wide hat popular among young African American and Hispanic hipsters and patronized the night spots in Boston’s Roxbury and New York’s Harlem ghettos. The seedy side of this life proved to be his downfall. His graduation to the more serious crime of burglary eventually landed him in prison, and at twenty years of age, he began serving six years of a ten-year sentence in Massachusetts’s Charlestown and Norfolk penitentiaries. Initially, Malcolm was hardly a model prisoner. In many ways, however, prison proved to be his redemption, for it was in prison that Malcolm converted to a version of Islam that changed his life. Largely through the efforts of his sisters and brothers, who visited him regularly, Malcolm was introduced to the ideas and philosophy of a little-known Muslim sect, the Nation of Islam, headed by Elijah Muhammad. Gradually, Malcolm abandoned his aggressive behavior, adopted Muslim prayer and life practices, and enmeshed himself in the teachings of Muhammad. Malcolm as a Muslim Malcolm absorbed the Nation of Islam interpretation of the history of races, an interpretation that explained how and why white people came to be regarded as “devils” and the oppressors of black people throughout the world. Based on Elijah Muhammad’s teaching, Malcolm’s own life experiences, and wide reading in history, politics, and economics, Malcolm came to understand how central the role of white people had been in causing the lowly conditions of African Americans. Muhammad could not have found another adherent with a wider breadth of knowledge about black and white race relations than Malcolm. Their attraction to each other and Malcolm’s commitment to spreading Muhammad’s message placed Malcolm in an ideal position for elevation to a more visible role in the Islamic organization. Shortly after his parole in 1952, Malcolm was appointed minister of Temple No. 7 in Harlem by the Muslim leader. Articulate and intellectually gifted, Malcolm undertook his duties with a passion and energy unmatched by his peers. He increased the membership in his own temple and traveled throughout the country organizing new mosques. By 1959, the sect could boast of

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forty-nine temples nationwide and more than forty thousand members. In six years, temple establishment increased nearly tenfold, and Malcolm almost single-handedly accounted for this. By 1960, Malcolm clearly had emerged as the second most influential man in the Nation of Islam, and he was the national spokesman for Elijah Muhammad. Malcolm was heard on the radio and seen on national television. Converts and sympathizers read about his views through the columns of the newspaper that he established, Muhammad Speaks, and in other African American urban newspapers for which he regularly wrote. In his Harlem street meetings, he railed against police brutality, and he quelled potentially explosive confrontations between African Americans and law enforcement officials. He continued to “fish” on the ghetto streets for new converts, appealing to them with a mastery of oratory that condemned white racism and the failure of liberal black and white leaders to address the real needs of the African American community. In no uncertain terms, he told listeners that African American men sought to present and defend themselves as men, violently if necessary. Change would occur in the United States, he said, either by the ballot or by the bullet. Speaking Out In the span of a few short years, Malcolm’s name was as familiar as that of Martin Luther King, Jr. Malcolm’s national notoriety and influence sparked rivalry and jealousy within the ranks of the Nation of Islam, however. Even Elijah Muhammad, who had warned Malcolm of potential internal dangers from becoming too powerful, grew envious of his national prominence. Rival factions looked for ways to bring him down. The opportunity occurred in December, 1963, following President John F. Kennedy’s assassination, when Malcolm violated Muhammad’s order for Muslims to remain silent about the murder. In an interview, Malcolm equated the president’s death to “chickens coming home to roost,” an impolitic remark that provided the excuse for Muhammad to punish him. Discredited and officially silenced for ninety days, Malcolm’s influence within the Nation of Islam waned precipitously.

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Unable to forge an effective reconciliation with Muhammad and increasingly determined to speak more broadly for African Americans independent of Nation of Islam constraints, Malcolm left the organization in early 1964 to form his own group, Muslim Mosque, Inc. A pilgrimage to Mecca, the Hajj, and subsequent travel to Africa expanded his understanding about the true nature of Islam, validated his status as an international personality, and helped him to define new agendas in his fight for black people worldwide. A new Malcolm with a new Islamic name, El-Hajj Malik El-Shabazz, hoped to accomplish his agenda through a more politically oriented organization of his making, the Organization of Afro-American Unity. The Assassination Malcolm remained a marked man, however, and was unable to escape the vilification of enemies in the Nation of Islam. Privately and publicly, they denounced him as a traitor to Elijah Muhammad and placed him under surveillance. From many quarters, those threatened by Malcolm’s mass appeal and influence called for violent retribution. In February, 1964, he and his family escaped death from a bomb that destroyed their home. Malcolm’s pleas for peace with the Nation of Islam could not stave off another attempt on his life. On February 21, 1965, while speaking before a crowd of several hundred followers in Harlem’s Audubon Ballroom, Malcolm was felled by a fusillade of bullets. In March, 1966, a racially mixed jury found three men— Talmadge Hayer, Norman 3X Butler, and Thomas 15X Johnson— guilty of first-degree murder in Malcolm’s death. Despite their conviction, conspiracy theories about Malcolm’s death have remained, including theories implicating non-Muslims and even the U.S. government. Robert L. Jenkins Further Reading George Breitman, Herman Porter, and Baxter Smith’s The Assassination of Malcolm X (New York: Pathfinder Press, 1976) investigates the authors’ claim of a cover-up regarding Malcolm’s death. Karl Evanzz’s The Judas Factor: The Plot to Kill Malcolm X

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(New York: Thunder’s Mouth Press, 1992) is a detailed, documented account revealing the author’s theory that the intelligence community was involved in Malcolm’s death. Michael Friedly’s Malcolm X, the Assassination (New York: Carroll & Graf, 1992) explores the various conspiracy theories advanced about Malcolm’s murder and gives extensive coverage of his relationship with Elijah Muhammad. Bruce Perry’s Malcolm: The Life of a Man Who Changed Black America (Barrytown, N.Y.: Station Hill, 1991) revises earlier images of Malcolm’s life and public career, presenting a man whose childhood was burdened with hardship and violence and who was driven by the need for acceptance by the society he condemned as racist. See also Black Power movement; Civil Rights movement; Civil rights worker murders; King assassination; Nation of Islam

Marshall’s appointment to the Supreme Court The Event: Appointment of the first African American justice to the U.S. Supreme Court Date: Sworn in on October 2, 1967 Place: Washington, D.C. After a distinguished career as a trial attorney for the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, Thurgood Marshall added to his distinctions during nearly a quarter of a century on the Supreme Court. Thurgood Marshall was one of the most important lawyers of the twentieth century. During his years as legal counsel to the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), he argued thirty-two cases before the U.S. Supreme Court and participated in eleven other Supreme Court cases. His lifework can be viewed as defining the progress in race relations in the United States in the twentieth century. His victories before the Court brought an end to legally sanctioned racial segregation in the United States.

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Thurgood Marshall, the first African American justice on the U.S. Supreme Court. (Library of Congress)

Legal Career Marshall was born in Baltimore, Maryland, and received his diploma from the segregated Frederick Douglass High School in 1925. Five years later, he obtained a bachelor’s degree, graduating with honors from the all-male, all-black Lincoln University in Oxford, Pennsylvania. Prohibited from attending the University of Maryland law school because of the state’s segregation policy, Marshall enrolled at the all-black Howard University School of Law in Washington, D.C., in 1930. There, Marshall studied under Charles Hamilton Houston, the first African American to win a case before the Supreme Court and head of the NAACP’s legal office. After three years, Marshall earned a law degree, finishing first in his class. That same year, he was admitted to the Maryland bar and opened a private practice in Baltimore. In 1934, Marshall gave up his private practice and became chief legal counsel for the Baltimore branch of the NAACP. The following year, Marshall won his first major civil rights case, which resulted in a state court ordering that the University of

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Maryland law school admit a qualified African American man who had been denied admission on account of his race. In 1936, Marshall joined the national staff of the NAACP and served as assistant special counsel (1936-1938); chief legal counsel (19381940); chief legal counsel, Legal Defense and Educational Fund (1940-1950); and director-chief legal counsel, Legal Defense and Educational Fund (1950-1961). During this twenty-five year period, Marshall traveled throughout the country using his legal skills to protect the rights of African Americans. He represented African Americans who had been the victims of discrimination in employment, housing, and transportation. He spoke up for African Americans accused of murder, theft, and rape. He counseled African Americans in tenant-landlord disputes, labor disputes, and courts-martial. In addition, he helped in cases involving coerced confessions, jury exclusions, and witness tampering. When clear racial overtones prejudiced a case, Marshall and the NAACP provided assistance to African Americans. Beginning in 1938, Marshall participated either by direct argument or by assisting in the preparation of the legal briefs in fortythree cases brought before the U.S. Supreme Court by the NAACP. In thirty-two cases, he participated by direct argument; he was victorious in twenty-nine. In eleven other cases, Marshall assisted in the preparation of the legal briefs. These cases constitute much of the significant civil rights litigation of the twentieth century. During Marshall’s tenure at the NAACP, the Supreme Court decided many cases with great constitutional and societal significance. Perhaps the most important were those in which the Court struck down whites-only primaries (primary elections in which a political party restricted participation to white persons), restrictive property covenants (which prohibited a certain class of persons from owning or occupying land), and racially segregated public educational facilities (which existed throughout the country). In each of these cases, Marshall was the mastermind behind the legal strategy. In Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas (1954), perhaps the most important Supreme Court case dealing with civil rights, the Court declared that “[s]eparate educational facilities [were] inherently unequal.”

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Judicial Career Seven years after Brown, Marshall left the NAACP. In 1961, President John F. Kennedy nominated him for a seat on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit. The Senate confirmed his appointment on September 11, 1962, by a vote of 54 to 16. Marshall resigned his judgeship in 1965 to accept the position of solicitor general of the United States—a position that made him responsible for all federal government litigation before the Supreme Court. As solicitor general, Marshall argued nineteen cases for the government before the Supreme Court. In fourteen of those cases, the government prevailed. On June 13, 1967, President Lyndon B. Johnson nominated Marshall to succeed Associate Justice Tom Clark on the Supreme Court. In announcing his selection, Johnson made it clear that Marshall’s race was a significant factor, saying, “It is the right thing to do, the right time to do it, the right man and the right place.” On August 30, 1967, by a vote of 69-11, the Senate confirmed Marshall. He thus became the first African American to sit on the highest bench in the land. Marshall was sworn in as an associate justice of the Supreme Court on October 2, 1967. Consequences While on the Supreme Court, Marshall continued to work for civil rights and equality of the races under the law. Marshall retired on June 27, 1991, at the age of eighty-two, having served on the Court for twenty-four years. His appointment to and successes while a member of the Supreme Court led to an increased number of African American lawyers and judges, many of whom continue to fulfill Marshall’s legacy of breaking the color barrier and creating a more equal society. Richard A. Glenn Further Reading Williams, Juan. Thurgood Marshall: American Revolutionary. New York: Times Books, 1998.

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See also Brown v. Board of Education; Civil Rights movement; National Association for the Advancement of Colored People Legal Defense and Educational Fund; Thomas-Hill hearings

Martin v. Wilks The Case: U.S. Supreme Court ruling on employment discrimination Date: June 12, 1989 In this decision, the Supreme Court held that a group complaining of employment discrimination must include all other relevant groups in its complaint. The ruling was later largely overturned by the Civil Rights Act of 1991. Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist wrote the decision for the 5-4 majority, holding that African American firefighters who complained of hiring and promotion discrimination should have included all white firefighters in their original complaint. The African Americans did not, and the lower court ruled that the white firefighters attempted to intervene too late in the proceedings. The lower court allowed a consent decree to be entered which the white firefighters regarded as a form of reverse discrimination. The Supreme Court overturned the consent decree favoring the African American employees, but Congress believed that the Court went too far and amended the Civil Rights Act in 1991 to make it marginally easier for African Americans to file employment discrimination complaints. Justice John Paul Stevens wrote a strong dissent in which he was joined by Justices Thurgood Marshall, William J. Brennan, Jr., and Harry A. Blackmun. Richard L. Wilson See also Civil Rights Act of 1991; Employment; Fourteenth Amendment

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The Media Definition: Print, radio, and television news media and broadcast entertainment African Americans were long excluded from participation in publishing because of the restrictions placed on literacy among slaves. After emancipation, African Americans had to overcome discrimination and negative stereotyping before having their voices fully heard in print and broadcasting media. Many African Americans throughout their history in the United States were largely isolated from society. During nearly two centuries of slavery, mandates prohibited slaves from being taught to read and write, although many slaves became literate despite such egregious restrictions. Slaves were discouraged from communicating with each other on any but the most superficial levels. The only places where they could communicate with a degree of freedom were their churches, where they were permitted to gather for religious services that sometimes evolved into forums in which they discussed their situations quite circumspectly. The early restrictions placed upon slaves and imposed by segregation encouraged the growth of print media among African Americans, which provided the best source of contact that most of them had with the free world. With emancipation at the end of the Civil War in 1865, the legal status of African Americans changed drastically, yet many of the realities of their previous lives lingered. In the South—and in many northern states—segregation, legislated or de facto, was the rule. In the early nineteenth century, not all African Americans were slaves. Some former slaves bought their freedom or achieved it when their masters died leaving directions to free their slaves. Many free African Americans gravitated to the northeast where they were more hospitably received than they would have been elsewhere in the country. Boston, New York City, and Philadelphia developed substantial enclaves of such freemen in the first half of the nineteenth century.

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Print Media The earliest publishing by African Americans in the United States was undertaken by the AME Book Concern in Philadelphia, founded in 1817 by the African Methodist Episcopal Church. This company, the first such enterprise in the United States owned and operated solely by African Americans, published both religious and secular books. It continued to operate until 1952. A second pre-Civil War African American publishing company, the AME Zion Book Concern, was founded in 1841 by members of the African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church in New York City. Still operating in Charlotte, North Carolina, it publishes only religious books. At least six other African American publishing companies were founded between the end of the Civil War in 1865 and 1956, the year in which the Nation of Islam sponsored Muhammad’s Temple No. 2 Publications. As African American colleges and universities were established, university presses were supported by at least five such institutions. Notable among these was Hampton Institute, which published a variety of books and pamphlets as well as The Southern Workman, an African American periodical published continuously between 1871 and 1939. University presses also existed at Atlanta University, Tuskegee Institute, Fisk University, and Howard University. Atlanta University Press issued important monographs produced by the university’s sociology department under the direction of its head, W. E. B. Du Bois. Beginning in 1912, The Negro Yearbook became a continuing annual publication of Tuskegee. Fisk University Press published important socioeconomic studies focusing on African Americans. Howard University Press, not officially organized until 1974, has published creative fiction and poetry as well as impressive critical studies in literature. As early as 1913, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) published books written for juvenile readers about prominent African Americans. Just So Publishers, a flourishing producer of children’s books, was founded in 1988 and is owned and operated by African Americans. During the 1990’s, a brisk trade in comic books aimed specifically at the African American market also developed.

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The earliest African American newspaper, Freedom’s Journal, which first appeared in 1827, was edited by Samuel Cornish and John B. Russwurm. The highly influential newspaper of abolitionist Frederick Douglass, The North Star, began publication in 1847 and greatly influenced white abolitionists in the Northeast. During the 1880’s, as African American populations in northern cities increased, more African American newspapers were founded. By 1890, Boston, New York City, Philadelphia, Baltimore, Chicago, Indianapolis, Washington, and Cleveland had African American newspapers. By 1900, African American daily newspapers were also being published in Norfolk, Virginia, and Kansas City, Missouri. The readership for such newspapers grew to the point that in 1940, over two hundred African American newspapers, most of them weeklies, were operating throughout the United States. African American magazines appeared as early as the 1830’s, but few survived for long before 1910, when the NAACP launched The Crisis, which gained a large and devoted readership. In 1945, John H. Johnson, who founded The Negro Digest in 1942, began publishing Ebony, which many people compared to Life. By the early twenty-first century, it was reaching more than two million subscribers. Tan (retitled Black Stars), a woman’s magazine that Johnson began in 1950, sold over 300,000 copies during its first year. Its success led to the launching of Jet in 1951. Black Enterprise, first published in 1970, attracted over 251,000 subscribers and was still the authoritative source of information about African American businesspeople and entrepreneurs in 2005. Radio Broadcasting By the 1920’s, radio had found its way into many American homes. For African Americans, it was a medium for the dissemination of information that served a function similar to that served by churches during the days of slavery. Radio dramas of the 1920’s represented African American characters more as buffoons than as rounded human beings deserving of serious attention. Such early radio shows as Beulah and Amos and Andy portrayed their title characters as undependable, unintelligent, and

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The Little Rock school desegregation crisis of 1957 attracted national media attention. (Library of Congress)

inept. Conversely, during the same period, radio performances by such talented musicians as Duke Ellington and Paul Robeson brought serious African American artists into mainstream American homes. The first African American program aimed specifically at black audiences was The All-Negro Hour broadcast over Chicago’s white-owned radio station WSBC beginning in 1929. The program offered music, serial drama, and comedy by African American performers. Despite the economic meltdown of the Great Depression during the 1930’s, The All-Negro Hour survived until 1935, after which its host, Jack Cooper, continued to produce occasional black-oriented programs for WSBC. Following World War II, African Americans made strides in radio broadcasting, although at the end of the war in 1945, every radio station in the United States was owned by whites. Listen Chicago became the first program in the news-discussion format directed to African American audiences. Black disc jockeys played so-called “race music” and developed outrageous on-air personalities that began to attract listeners from a broad racial cross section. As these brash personalities

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came to dominate black radio broadcasting in the 1960’s and 1970’s, disc jockeys with “attitude” did much to encourage the Civil Rights movement of that period. In the segregated South, radio overcame some of the social and physical limitations that segregation imposed on black citizens. It was not until 1949 that radio station WDIA in Memphis, Tennessee made history by employing an all-African-American onair announcing staff. In the same period, Nashville’s WLAC started broadcasting African American rhythm-and-blues music, first to largely black listeners but later to more racially diverse audiences, whose numbers justified sponsors’ purchase of advertising time. As African Americans became a strong economic and political force within many communities, they assumed ownership of many radio stations. By the early 1970’s, two major black networks, the Mutual Black Network (now Sheridan Broadcasting), founded in 1972, and the National Black Network, founded in 1973, were in operation. In the 1980’s, these networks had a combined audience estimated at more than ten million people. By 1990, radio stations in the United States that served African American audiences numbered over 600, of which 206 were owned by African Americans. Television Broadcasting Lionel Monagas was an African American pioneer in television. In the 1950’s, he directed such mainstream television programs as Face the Nation and Edward R. Murrow’s Person to Person. Monagas also produced numerous children’s programs for Philadelphia’s WHYY-TV, including a ten-part series, The History of the Negro, narrated by Ossie Davis. With the racial unrest that loomed in the late 1960’s and early 1970’s, television began to play a new and important role in the lives of Americans. Because it was able to bring the brutal realities of racial conflict into the living rooms of middle class Americans, television had a profound effect on the Civil Rights movement. Open conflicts in places such as Montgomery, Alabama, and Little Rock, Arkansas, were no longer abstractions but disturbing realities for those who watched them unfold on television.

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In 1965, most African American journalists were still print journalists. In that year, Mal Goode was hired by the American Broadcasting Company (ABC) to read the news in two fifteen-minute weekly slots it had allocated to its African American audience. The network apparently interviewed thirty-eight African Americans when they sought to fill the job, but considered some of them “too light” to be recognized as African American on television screens. By contrast, other applicants were considered “too black”—presumably black enough to unnerve white viewers. During the mid-1960’s, Pat Connell anchored morning newscasts for the Columbia Broadcasting System (CBS), but WNEWTV, WOR-TV, and WPIX-TV had no African Americans on their staffs. In 1963, William C. Matney, Jr., became a television and radio reporter for Chicago’s WMAQ-TV, which was owned and controlled by whites. Three years later, WNBC-TV news hired him. Eventually such luminaries as Bryant Gumbel, Ed Bradley, and Oprah Winfrey emerged as towering national personalities in mainstream network television. Public television paid fleeting homage to African American viewers with Tony Brown’s Black Journal (later renamed Tony Brown’s Journal) in the 1970’s. The show was well received by African American viewers, but conservative whites complained that it had an anti-presidential administration bias. The program was saved by a grant from Pepsi Cola. The only black commissioner on the Federal Communications Commission, Benjamin Hooks, joined the chorus of complaints against public television, condemning it for its arrogance and for its focus on topics of interest primarily to white viewers. By the late 1980’s, African Americans were beginning to enter positions in television management. Five became general managers of major television stations, including Philadelphia’s influential WCAU-TV. When Jonathan Rodgers was named president of the CBS Television Stations Division in 1990, he became the nation’s highest-ranking African American news executive. Nevertheless, by the year 1990, African Americans constituted only 9.8 percent of television news staffs in the United States and 5 percent of the workforce in the nation’s commercial radio sta-

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tions. Most of the news stories on television continued to be the work of white men. The course of television programming has reflected significant changes in American attitudes toward African Americans. Shortly after World War II, there were few major roles for African Americans on mainstream television. They were often portrayed stereotypically. By 1970, however, network television featured African Americans in starring or co-starring roles in nineteen series, with a similar number of programs featuring African American characters in supporting roles. The popularity of some of these series is confirmed by the fact that a number of them, notably The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air, Hanging with Mr. Cooper, Martin, Living Single, The Jeffersons, Sanford and Son, and The Cosby Show, endured for at least five seasons and some of them ranked among the most-watched programs on network television. By the early twenty-first century, African Americans had a pervasive presence throughout television broadcasting, but criticisms of the ways in which they were depicted continued. R. Baird Shuman Further Reading Barlow, William. Voice Over: The Making of Black Radio. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1998. The most complete historical treatment of black radio broadcasting in print. Johnson, John, with Jeff Coplon. Only Son: A Memoir. New York: Warner Books, 2002. The story of how an African American rose to become a national television news anchor. Mabunde, L. Mpho. The African American Almanac. 7th ed. Detroit: Gale Research, 1997. Comprehensive overview of significant aspects of African American life in the United States. Stewart, Shelley, with Nathan Hale Turner, Jr. The Road South: A Memoir. New York: Warner Books, 2002. Intimate story of how an African American rose to become a major figure in African American broadcasting. Torres, Sasha, ed. Living Color: Race and Television in the United States. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1998. Valuable collection of essays on African American television in the United States.

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Zook, Kristal B. Color by Fox: The Fox Network and the Revolution in Black Television. New York: Oxford University Press, 1999. Assesses the role Fox television has played in African American programming. See also Baseball’s integration; Film history; Harlem Renaissance; Literature; Music; Roots; Sports

Miami riots The Event: Major racial riot incited by the exoneration of police officers charged with fatally beating an African American Date: May 17-23, 1980 Place: Miami, Florida The Miami riots of 1980 constituted one of the most violent urban disorders in the United States since the 1960’s. The random killing of whites, not merely the looting of stores, was the goal of the rioters. Yet if the excesses of the rioters were terrible, the provocation that moved them to these acts was also severe. On December 17, 1979, Arthur McDuffie, a thirty-three-year-old African American insurance agent with no criminal record, was riding along the highway on his motorcycle when several officers of the Public Safety Department of Dade County ordered him to stop. When he refused to do so, he was pursued; when captured, he was beaten severely with nightsticks and heavy flashlights. McDuffie died a few days later from the injuries he had sustained at the hands of the police. This was the last of several incidents of alleged police brutality in the county in 1979: These included the shooting death of a teenager in Hialeah; the alleged sexual abuse of a prepubescent African American girl by a white police officer; and the severe beating administered by police to a black schoolteacher, after the police had raided his house in search of illegal drugs. The Trial and Its Aftermath The state attorney for Dade County, Janet Reno, prepared a case against four Dade County police officers who had beaten

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McDuffie. The case was brought to trial on March 31, 1980, in the town of Tampa, on the state’s gulf coast; it was believed that the officers could not get a fair trial in Miami. Because of peremptory challenges by the defense attorney, the jury before which the case was tried was all white. The jury’s decision, handed down on Saturday afternoon, May 17, 1980, shocked Miami’s African American community: The police officers were acquitted of all charges. In the early evening hours of May 17, the anger of the black Miamians boiled over into violence; rocks began to fly, and mobs began to attack individuals. Later that evening, after a mob attempt to set fire to the Metro Justice Building was barely repulsed, the governor of Florida, Bob Graham, ordered the National Guard to Miami; it did not arrive in full force, however, until Tuesday. It was not until May 23 that the situation was returned to normal. As a result of the riots, 18 people died and hundreds were injured. There was eighty million dollars’ worth of property damage and 1,100 people were arrested. Many Miami businesses were burned: African American, Cuban, and nativeborn white business owners all suffered. Major arteries of traffic, used by motorists of all races and ethnic backgrounds, ran through Liberty City, a black area near Miami. In the evening hours of May 17, several white motorists, presumably unaware of the verdict, drove through that neighborhood, where they encountered maddened crowds, composed mostly of young people, bent on revenge. About 250 whites were injured that night in attacks by rioters; 7 whites died as a result of the injuries sustained. Of those who died, one middle-aged woman perished from severe burns when her car was set afire; a young sales clerk, a teenager, and a sixty-three-year-old Cuban refugee butcher died as the result of severe beatings. The reign of terror that night was mitigated only by the willingness of some courageous African Americans to rescue persons threatened by the mobs. The deliberate attacks on whites distinguished the Miami riot from the urban riots of the late 1960’s, in which most deaths had occurred by accident. In the days following that bloody Saturday, African Americans were riot victims as well. Some of those killed were rioters; others were law-abiding individuals mistaken for rioters by the

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police; still others appear to have been random shooting victims of unknown white assailants. Most Miami-area African Americans were neither rioters nor heroes nor victims; they simply waited for the disturbances to end. For the United States, the Miami riot of 1980 ended twelve years of freedom from major urban riots. Riots broke out again in Miami’s African American ghetto in December, 1982; in January, 1989 (when a Hispanic police officer, William Lozano, shot and killed an African American motorcyclist); and in July, 1995. The later riots, however, were not as costly in lives or property as the 1980 outburst. In May, 1993, Lozano’s acquittal by a jury in Orlando was not followed by violence. The Miami riot of 1980 was an alarm bell, warning the United States of the sharp tensions between the races that still persisted a decade and a half after the legislative victories of the Civil Rights movement, and of the combustible possibilities that existed wherever African Americans, native-born whites, and Hispanic immigrants lived side by side. The triggering of the Miami riot by an unpopular jury verdict rather than by immediate actions by the police foreshadowed the trajectory of the disastrous riot of April 29-May 1, 1992, in Los Angeles, California. Paul D. Mageli Further Reading Paul Anderson’s Janet Reno: Doing the Right Thing (New York: John Wiley and Sons, 1994) offers insights into the character and personality of a key player in the 1980 events. Raymond A. Mohl’s “On the Edge: Blacks and Hispanics in Metropolitan Miami Since 1959” (Florida Historical Quarterly 69, July, 1990) traces the riots of 1980, 1982, and 1989 back to African American anger at Cuban success. Bruce Porter and Marvin Dunn’s The Miami Riot of 1980: Crossing the Bounds (Lexington, Mass.: D. C. Heath, 1984) is a detailed book-length account of the 1980 riot. Alejandro Portes and Alex Stepick’s City on the Edge: The Transformation of Miami (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993) presents the May, 1980, riot as part of a long process by which Miami-area blacks came to see Cuban refugees, as well as native-born whites, as their oppressors. Jerome H. Skolnick and James J. Fyfe’s Above

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the Law: Police and the Excessive Use of Force (New York: Free Press, 1993) compares the McDuffie incident with cases of police brutality in other U.S. cities and provides a good account of efforts within the Dade County police department, after 1980, to control the use of force by police. See also Cubans and African Americans; Kerner Commission; King beating case; Los Angeles riots; Race riots of 1943; Race riots of 1967; Race riots of the twentieth century; Watts riot

Military Racial and ethnic relations in the U.S. military became the center of attention with the integration of the armed forces in 1948 and the shift to an all-volunteer service in 1973. Sociological, ethical, and political concerns revolve around recruitment, promotion, and official military policy regarding race. The regular service of members of minorities, especially African Americans, in the U.S. military is a relatively recent phenomenon. Before the Civil War (1861-1865), the U.S. military tradition was one of erratic militia-based service and sanctioned prejudice. Therefore, minorities played very little role in U.S. military life. The Civil War saw the first real attempt to incorporate African Americans into the service, strangely enough, on both sides of that conflict. However, they were largely used in noncombat roles, especially in the South, and their use, though playing a marginally important part in the Union’s victory, was hotly debated and carefully segregated. This segregation continued well into the twentieth century through two world wars. The years immediately after World War II saw the first impetus for change. Various segregated black units and a few individual black servicemen (such as Dorrie Miller, a Navy hero at Pearl Harbor) had distinguished themselves in battle, and this opened the debate on the desegregation of the armed forces. President Harry S. Truman initiated new policies on race relations in the military, and the services were mostly integrated by the start of the Korean War in 1950. The U.S. Navy, previously the most con-

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servative branch, actually took the early lead in promoting equality within the ranks. Gradually, African Americans began gaining some ground, a few even rising to officer status. From Conscription to the All-Volunteer Force Modern U.S. wars, from the Civil War to the Vietnam War, were fought largely by conscripts or draftees. In the two world wars, conscription and segregation went hand in hand. The wars in Korea and Vietnam, especially the latter, were the first American experiences with draftees fighting in an integrated service. Although conscription was designed to promote equitable social and ethnic representation in the services, it was often alleged that African Americans were overly represented and burdened with the risks of combat during the Vietnam War. Indeed, the poor and members of minorities appear to have suffered from the inequities of the draft, in large part because middle-class and more affluent people could more easily be excused from service or obtain deferments. This discrepancy was also caused by the war’s increasing unpopularity. As the combat effectiveness of conscripts declined in the later years of the Vietnam War, the debate ensued as to the desirability of having an all-volunteer force (AVF). Initially, opposition to ending the draft arose from many quarters. This opposition was based on notions that a large, allvolunteer force would be mercenary, ineffective, socially unrepresentative, and costly. Nevertheless, in 1970, a presidential task force known as the Gates Commission forwarded recommendations that an AVF was possible if military pay and benefits were raised to meet civilian standards. By 1973, the AVF was in place as the last U.S. troops left Vietnam. This AVF seemed to function well at first, but problems arose that led to a decline in quality of personnel for the next decade. The 1980’s, however, saw two important changes occur: the onset of serious effort and spending to upgrade the AVF and the implementation of solid racial policies in the U.S. military. The AVF and Race Relations The 1980’s saw a marked improvement in the overall effectiveness of the AVF. Higher pay, better benefits, and more effective

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Brigadier General Benjamin O. Davis, Sr., the first African American general in the U.S. military, during World War II. (National Archives)

advertising have been cited as the cause. Enlistment eligibility requirements were raised considerably during this time. The number of African Americans enlisting in the service continued to rise, reaching 22 percent in 1989. The greatest increase in black recruits occurred in the U.S. Navy, where enlistment doubled. Because of the higher eligibility standards, the educational and aptitude levels of all recruits, including members of minorities, continued to rise into the 1990’s. With this higher-quality recruit came a concerted effort at improving race relations and the advancement prospects of members of minorities in the services. In some respects, an outward attempt was made to make the AVF not only combat effective but also an ideal model in the areas of cost-efficiency, team effort, and race relations. Efforts to improve recruits’ sensitivity to race began as early as 1973, but the U.S. military consistently added policies throughout the years that have achieved a remarkable level of color-blind professionalism. Racial incidents underwent a steady decline and have been dealt with sternly. The military maintains a complex system of grievance proce-

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dures and racial protocol. Indeed, the U.S. military’s record on race is, by most accounts, far better than its record on gender and other issues. The issue of race and social representation is also a factor in both vocational placement and promotion through the ranks. For active-duty personnel, there appears to be equal representation in combat roles, while African Americans occupy larger numbers of clerical, administrative, and logistical positions. A few experts have even suggested capping minority recruitment in some areas, although this would revive the issue of discrimination. The U.S. military boasts the largest percentage of members of minorities in command roles in its entire history, and an African American officer, General Colin Powell, served as chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff during the critical period of the Gulf War. When that conflict erupted in early 1991, it was seen as a major test of the effectiveness of the AVF. Smart bombs and other high-tech weaponry may have garnered the attention of most viewers, but professional military men were quick to point out the readiness and steady professionalism of the men and women of the allvolunteer force that handily won the Gulf War. Gene Redding Wynne, Jr. Further Reading Three excellent books to consult on this topic are Gerald Astor’s The Right to Fight: A History of African Americans in the Military (Novato, Calif.: Presidio, 1998), Gail Buckley’s American Patriots: The Story of Blacks in the Military from the Revolution to Desert Storm (New York: Random House, 2001), and Robert B. Edgerton’s Hidden Heroism: Black Soldiers in America’s Wars (Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press, 2001). S. A. Stouffer’s The American Soldier (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1949) offers an account of the motives behind integration of the services. Bowman, Little, and Sicilia’s The AllVolunteer Force After a Decade (Washington, D.C.: PergamonBrassey’s, 1986) sheds some positive light on the emerging professional army of the period. D. Bandow’s “An Involuntary Military: Paying More for Less,” in The Anthropo Factor in Warfare: Conscripts, Volunteers, and Reserves (Washington, D.C.: National De-

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fense University, 1988), edited by Lee Austin, clearly expresses some doubts. David R. Segal, in Recruiting for Uncle Sam (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1989) deals with the attraction of new recruits to the service. For a firsthand look at the role of black troops in the new military, see Ronald Walters’s AfricanAmerican Participation in the All-Volunteer Force, testimony before the Committee on Armed Services, U.S. House of Representatives, March 4, 1991. See also Brownsville incident; Buffalo soldiers; Civil War; Defense industry desegregation; Military desegregation; Tuskegee Airmen; Vietnam War; World War II

Military desegregation The Event: Formal abolition of racial segregation in the organization of the U.S. military services by an executive order Date: July 26, 1948 Place: Washington, D.C. The official desegregation of the armed forces continued a process of granting equal civil rights in American life and acted as an important impetus for the desegregation of public facilities. At the beginning of World War II, the American armed services, reflecting larger patterns in American society, were almost completely segregated. Although African Americans had participated in every war, their numbers were small, their roles were limited, and their units were almost always segregated. History of Segregation Few African American units engaged in combat in the SpanishAmerican War or in World War I. Their uneven levels of performance allowed many white Army officers to retain their prejudices, thus limiting African American troop deployment and obstructing the services’ willingness to desegregate. American success in both those wars allowed for the maintenance of a racial status quo in the military. Change effected by World War I and the industrialization of America created conditions allowing for

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movement toward a more egalitarian civilian life. Many African Americans moved from the rural South to the industrialized North, where their incomes and education rose dramatically. Racial relations began to change. World War II provided the spark to ignite the Civil Rights movement. In addition to the underlying internal demographic changes, the war provided specific conditions enabling progress in civil rights. First, America went to war with the avowed intention of defeating the racism and aggression of both Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan. The main reason for American involvement in the war was protection of human rights. Second, the large African American emigration to the North created a new voting bloc, historically Republican but newly Democratic because of the economic and political policies of the New Deal. Moreover, African Americans were concentrated in industrial states with large electoral college slates, especially important for presidential elections. Third, World War II was a protracted war in which American human resources were taxed. At the end of the war replacement personnel became harder to come by. Any policy of underenlisting or undertraining any sizable segment of the population, such as a policy segregating African Americans, led to problems of inefficiency and shortages. The armed services remained largely segregated throughout the war, although some desegregation occurred toward the end of the war. Units from the Army’s four black regiments—overstaffed with draftees—were merged with larger white ones suffering manpower shortages. In some cases, the same training facilities were made available to black and white units. Post-World War II Changes Immediately after the war, the direction bifurcated: internal armed services developments hindered significant change in the racial balance, while societal developments encouraged more rapid desegregation. Internally, as occurred after each previous war, pressures on the armed services to desegregate abated. The numbers of African Americans declined so drastically that African Americans could easily be accommodated in segregated units. Externally, the African American emigration from the rural

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South accelerated during and after World War II. African American voters increased in number. Civil rights organizations also grew in number and in political power: Over a period of six years, membership in the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) exploded ninefold to 450,000. Moreover, non-southern whites grew more sympathetic to the demands for greater equality, although there were periodic race riots in the North revolving especially around the issue of jobs and the fear that African Americans would dispossess whites. During the war, President Franklin D. Roosevelt took a few small steps to address the question of segregation. He recommended that African Americans be given more options in the Navy; he revived a 1937 War Department program to increase the numbers of African American soldiers to their proportion in society; and, most important, in 1941, via Executive Order 8802, he established the Fair Employment Practices Commission (FEPC). Roosevelt, much less committed to civil rights than his wife, Eleanor, was concerned primarily with winning the war and pleasing the southern component of his political coalition. Little was known about the civil rights orientation of Roosevelt’s successor, Harry S. Truman. As a senator from Missouri, Truman had been able to win essential African American votes by supporting the few pieces of civil rights legislation and by supporting New Deal economics. Truman, a centrist with humanitarian leanings and a respect for the Constitution, was a sharp politician but also a man moved by personal experiences. One national incident which shocked him and touched the hearts of many Americans involved a returning African American veteran. While still in uniform, literally on his return, Sergeant Isaac Woodard was removed from a bus by a local South Carolina sheriff and beaten with a nightstick so badly that he was blinded. A series of vicious attacks against and murders of African Americans in the South in 1946 led to public protests. Truman was quoted by Walter White as responding, “My God! I had no idea that it was as terrible as that. We have to do something.” Reacting to these incidents, to the changing demography, to a

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changing world environment, and to a new world of domestic politics, Truman set out on a course that would dramatically change human rights. Immediately after the war, Truman spoke out periodically about human rights, including statements in his State of the Union addresses in 1946 and 1948. He helped commission several internal studies of the armed forces which looked specifically at the status of African Americans. The most comprehensive study was made by the Gillem Board. In April, 1946, the board came up with a plan to expand the role of African Americans in the Army and to provide more equal facilities and opportunities. One key item was a quota of 10 percent in each large unit. The board did not, however, push for integration within the smaller units. Thus, the report, reflecting the military’s reluctance to change radically, was largely rejected by civil rights organizations, which favored desegregation of all facilities.

African Americans marching at the Democratic National Convention in 1948 to demand an end to segregation in the military. (Library of Congress)

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By 1947, two important conditions had changed. The Cold War was beginning in earnest, leading both the military and Truman to push for stronger, larger armed forces. Moreover, the United States began an ideological war of propaganda against the Soviet Union focusing in part on basic human rights. The international audience for this campaign was largely nonwhite. Second, the Republicans controlled both houses of Congress and Truman’s chances for a presidential victory in 1948 looked bleak. He knew that he could not win without a substantial proportion of the African American vote. Mounting Pressures The African American leadership pushed for more desegregation. On October 23, 1947, W. E. B. Du Bois and other radical African Americans embarrassed the administration by bringing charges against the American government before the newly formed United Nations Commission on Human Rights. Six months later, in a more mainstream development, A. Philip Randolph’s Committee Against Jim Crow in Military Service threatened an African American boycott of a new conscription law if it contained no antisegregation clause. In response to all these pressures and frustrated by Congress’s refusal to extend the FEPC, Truman took a major step when he commissioned the President’s Committee on Civil Rights, a fifteen-member board composed of leading figures from the worlds of business, academia, government, and religion. On October 29, 1947, this committee published its findings in To Secure These Rights, a monograph that received widespread public attention. The committee argued strongly on behalf of racial equality and prescribed deep-seated societal changes, including specific recommendations for desegregating all branches of the armed services. Truman took the report seriously, although he chose to implement it according to his own political calendar. That calendar became crowded in 1948, a presidential year that promised what looked like a certain victory for the Republicans. Frustrated with the Republican Congress, liberal Democrats pressured Truman to push for a liberal agenda. Some even joined

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a committee to draft Dwight D. Eisenhower. Part of that frustration led to a third-party, strongly pro-civil rights Progressive candidacy of Henry Wallace, Roosevelt’s former vice president. To make election matters even more complicated for Truman, some of the southern wing of the party bolted and nominated Strom Thurmond for president. Truman obliged the liberals, knowing that he needed the industrial states for victory. A Republican convention that made a strong statement on race—specifically, the desegregation of the armed services—and the surprising success of the liberal forces led by Hubert Humphrey on the Democratic Convention floor prompted Truman to release two key executive orders on July 26, 1948. Order 9980 called for a Fair Employment Board to provide redress for racial discrimination in federal employment. Executive Order 9981 announced the policy of “equality of treatment for all persons in the armed services without regard to race, color, religion, or national origin.” A second provision called for an advisory committee to oversee that policy of equality, constituted in September, 1948, as the Fahy Committee. Impact Exactly what did Executive Order 9981 entail? Was it another rhetorical promise, was it a plan to implement the Plessy v. Ferguson (1896) principle of “separate but equal,” or was it a plan to desegregate? In answer to a reporter’s public question, Truman made clear that it was indeed a plan to desegregate. In reality, the armed services did not desegregate immediately. Rather, there was uneven compliance both in time and in depth. Entrenched forces in the services resisted the orders and put up barriers to implementation. Nevertheless, desegregation progressed, supervised by the Fahy Committee and with the prodding of African American defense organizations. Wartime Secretary of War Henry Stimson, who opposed the idea, had been replaced by the first secretary of defense, James Forrestal, who was committed to the idea but unwilling to force it upon the service leadership. His successor, Louis Johnson, was more willing to go along with Truman in imposing it from the top.

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In part, the decisions were hindered or expedited by individuals along the chain of command. The most resistant force was Kenneth Royall, secretary of the same army which had previously been the service most open to African Americans. Eventually, Truman intervened personally with Royall’s successor, Gordon Gray. In the Far East, Douglas MacArthur managed to delay the policy, but it was accelerated when Truman replaced MacArthur with a more cooperative Matthew Ridgway. Change was more forthcoming from the Air Force, largely because of the strong support of Stuart Symington, later a Democratic senator from Missouri. The Marines, which had long been lily-white, also fell into place in short time. The Navy earlier had been more accommodating to African Americans in terms of numbers, but the overwhelming percentage of those were in the food service. Slowly, the Navy began to give more equal training to African Americans in other jobs and upgraded the ranks of some of the stewards. The war in Korea provided the final thrust for desegregation, again supported by the need for more troops to engage in combat. The remaining pockets of segregation were systematically eliminated, even under President Eisenhower, who was less committed to civil rights than was Truman. By the end of the Korean War, virtually all the armed services were desegregated at the most basic level. Segregation practices, however, still faced African American soldiers and their dependents, especially in the southern towns where many were stationed. Because local policy involved states’ rights, it took longer to overcome that discrimination. These practices were not legally resolved until the Supreme Court decisions that grew out of Executive Order 9981. The desegregation of the armed forces served as a reference point for the further desegregation of the rest of society. Under Truman, the Justice Department argued a number of cases before the Supreme Court which systematically eroded segregation as a legal policy. The Court issued decisions making restrictive housing covenants illegal (Shelley v. Kraemer, 1948); banning segregation in interstate busing (Henderson v. the U.S., 1950); giving rights to education (Sweatt v. Painter and McLaurin v. Oklahoma, 1950);

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and eventually, a year after the Korean War ended, banning segregation in public schools (Brown v. Board of Education, 1954). Beyond the legal cases, an important human dynamic arose from the consequences of Executive Order 9981. Those African Americans who were integrated in the armed forces found it difficult to return to a segregated civilian lifestyle. Their experiences in the military acted as an impetus for them to reject the segregation of civilian life. For whites who served with African Americans on the front lines, it also became more difficult to return to a completely segregated life. Moreover, especially after World War II and then Korea, it became increasingly difficult to accept the war contributions made by African American soldiers but then to deny them basic civilian rights afterward. Desegregating the armed services allowed for much greater contact between whites and African Americans, as well as among whites and significant numbers of Puerto Ricans and Filipinos, many of the latter also formerly in segregated units. In retrospect, the conditions allowing for successful interracial contact as a means of breaking down prejudice were more propitious in the military than they were in the school systems. Not only was there more regimentation in the military, but the soldiers also had both a common goal and a common enemy, conditions supporting the effectiveness of contact in dissolving differences. Although contact often has surprisingly little effect in diminishing prejudice, a study on soldiers conducted at Johns Hopkins University found that contact in the armed forces did contribute to a lessening of prejudice and discrimination. President Truman later remarked of Executive Order 9981, “It’s the greatest thing that ever happened to America.” A less effusive but similar evaluation was proffered by eminent legal and political historian Milton Konvitz: “[I]n the history of civil rights in the United States, this order ranks among the most important steps to end racial discrimination.” Alan M. Fisher Further Reading Astor, Gerald. The Right to Fight: A History of African Americans in the Military. Novato, Calif.: Presidio, 1998.

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Berman, William C. The Politics of Civil Rights in the Truman Administration. Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1970. A focused, insightful, balanced account of the interplay between political pressures and civil rights policy. Buckley, Gail. American Patriots: The Story of Blacks in the Miltary from the Revolution to Desert Storm. New York: Random House, 2001. Dalfiume, Richard M. Desegregation of the U.S. Armed Forces. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1969. One of the first scholarly treatises on the topic; still a good place to start. Foner, Jack D. Blacks and the Military in American History. New York: Praeger, 1974. A popular, easy-to-read, surprisingly comprehensive history, though lacking in specific citations and somewhat biased. McCoy, Donald R., and Richard T. Ruetten. Quest and Response: Minority Rights and the Truman Administration. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1973. Solid, comprehensive research. The best single concise discussion (see chapter 11) on this particular issue. Nalty, Bernard C. Strength for the Fight: A History of Black Americans in the Military. New York: Free Press, 1986. A solid, extensively researched, thorough history. Nichols, Lee. Breakthrough on the Color Front. New York: Random House, 1954. The first major work on this topic. Partly anecdotal and based on interviews; it was reportedly read by the judges before deciding Brown v. Board of Education. President’s Committee on Civil Rights. To Secure These Rights. Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1947. This original report shows a sincere concern with racial problems. Some statistics and general recommendations. Written from the perspective of mainstream America. See also Buffalo soldiers; Defense industry desegregation; Fair Employment Practices Committee; Integration; Military; President’s Committee on Civil Rights; Vietnam War; World War II

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Milliken v. Bradley The Case: U.S. Supreme Court ruling on mandatory school busing Date: July 25, 1974 In this case, the Supreme Court held that federal judges could not order the busing of students across school district lines into other districts that had done nothing to promote racial segregation. By the early 1970’s, many urban school districts continued to operate schools with a majority black population because of the dearth of white students in those school districts. In 1971, the U.S. Supreme Court in Swann v. Charlotte-Mecklenberg Board of Education had held that urban school boards could be required to engage in extensive school busing to integrate their schools. The Swann decision, however, did not address the issue of how to integrate urban school districts that had few white students. In the early 1970’s, a group of black parents, with the assistance of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People Legal Defense and Educational Fund, brought suit seeking to desegregate the Detroit school system. In 1972, federal district court judge Stephen Roth ruled that the Detroit schools were in fact illegally segregated and ordered a multidistrict desegregation plan involving the Detroit city school district along with fifty-three surrounding suburban school districts. One year later, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit affirmed, holding that the Detroit schools could not be adequately desegregated without such a multidistrict plan. Shortly thereafter, the U.S. Supreme Court agreed to hear the case. In 1973, the Supreme Court had considered a similar multidistrict desegregation plan involving the Richmond, Virginia, schools. In that case, the Court had divided 4 to 4, with Justice Lewis Powell recusing himself because of his prior membership on the Richmond School Board. The Court took the Detroit case to decide the question of whether multidistrict desegregation plans were required when inner-city school districts could not otherwise be desegregated. In the meantime, the specter of multidistrict desegregation prompted a firestorm of activity in Con-

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gress, as many members of Congress backed both legislation and amendments to the Constitution restricting the ability of federal courts to order extensive desegregation plans. In its 5-4 vote in the Milliken v. Bradley decision, the Supreme Court held that a district court should not order an interdistrict remedy unless it could be shown that the school district lines had been constructed in a manner to preserve segregation or unless state government officials had taken other action that contributed to the interdistrict segregation. This was a burden of proof that would prove difficult to meet. The Milliken decision marked the first time that the Supreme Court had declined to refine existing school desegregation jurisprudence to further integrationist goals. In the wake of the Milliken decision a few metropolitan areas did adopt interdistrict desegregation remedies, but, for the most part, the decision undermined desegregation efforts in America’s cities. Unable to utilize an assignment plan that included children from surrounding suburban school districts, inner-city school boards were greatly restricted in their efforts to desegregate their schools. Davison M. Douglas See also Brown v. Board of Education; Segregation

Million Man March The Event: Mass demonstration in the national capital organized by Louis Farrakhan and Benjamin Chavis Date: October 16, 1995 Place: Washington, D.C. Although the march’s controversial sponsors, Louis Farrakhan and Benjamin Chavis, caused many Americans, particularly certain black leadership, to question the legitimacy of the event, the march forced the nation to focus on the various predicaments that confronted African American men in the United States. On October 16, 1995, more than a million men of African descent converged on Washington, D.C. They came from all over the United States. The majority were poor and working class, a siz-

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able number were middle class, and some were affluent. They all came with the intention of becoming better men once they returned to their homes. The event was known as the Million Man March, and it was one of the major media stories of 1995. Led by the controversial Nation of Islam leader, Louis Farrakhan, and a former National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) leader, Benjamin Chavis, the march generated an ample amount of positive and negative publicity. Farrakhan is well known for his virulent anti-Semitic remarks, and Chavis was voted out of his position as NAACP president after it was disclosed that he had paid $332,400 in organizational funds to his former mistress. Farrakhan, by addressing the deepest concerns of many African Americans at a time when many other black politicians were alarmingly silent, managed to insert himself into the center of what was (and still is) an ongoing racial debate in the United States. Because of the march’s success, many mainstream media pundits conceded that Farrakhan was a force to be acknowledged. Ted Koppel, on ABC’s Nightline, stated that Farrakhan could be called “one of the most influential leaders in black America.” During the march, Farrakhan advocated pride, love, and black self-reliance. Dissenters From the outset, the event was mired in controversy. Many leaders, black and white, questioned the ability and/or sagacity of Farrakhan and Chavis to cosponsor a march that called for equality and brotherhood. Critics of Farrakhan pointed to his virulent anti-Semitic attacks on Jews and members of other minorities; critics of Chavis noted his larceny and infidelity. Both men were chided by many women and women’s rights organizations for their deeply ingrained sexism. Mary Francis Berry, chairperson of the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, wrote a letter in the October, 1995, issue of The Washington Post in which she stated, “I do not trust Louis Farrakhan or Benjamin Chavis to lead us to the Promised Land.” More than a few African Americans endorsed Berry’s sentiments. A U.S. News & World Report poll taken in 1995 found that 31 percent (almost a third) of African Americans harbored an unfavorable impression

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of Farrakhan. Such disdain was echoed by many Jewish leaders as well. On September 19, 1995, the Anti-Defamation League of B’nai B’rith (a Jewish civil rights organization) took out a fullpage advertisement in The New York Times aggressively denouncing Farrakhan. The advertisement stated, “This march will be led by the most mainstream anti-Semite in recent American history.” Alvin Poussaint, a leading black psychiatrist at Harvard University Medical School, said that Farrakhan had to confront his controversial racist past. Poussaint argued that Farrakhan could not continue to speak out of both sides of his mouth and fail to take into account how his own remarks were interpreted. The Million Man March also exposed the tension that existed between men and women in the African American community. Syndicated columnist Julianne Malveaux; Gloria Watkins, distinguished professor of English at City College in New York; and other prominent African American women denounced the event because of what they saw as the endemic paternalism and sexist message that the march promoted. Other African American women raised similar arguments. With the exception of poet Maya Angelou and Betty Shabazz (widow of Malcolm X), virtually no African American women were present at the march. Supporters of the “no women allowed” policy argued that by prohibiting African American women from attending the march, African American men would be able to concentrate on themselves as individuals and their responsibilities as men, and would not be distracted. Opponents of excluding women from the march argued that such a decision demonstrated the lack of sensitivity that has always been a part of the Nation of Islam regarding women. By engaging in such an act, Farrakhan and his supporters had ignored the crucial role that African American women have played in the struggle for freedom. By relegating African American women to a secondary role, Farrakhan demonstrated either his historical ignorance or gross insensitivity toward his female brethren. Economic Class Other supporters of the march participated out of a spirit of defiance. Although a sizable number of middle-class men at-

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tended the march, the majority of the men came from workingclass backgrounds. These were men who had seen their economic prospects falter and had become increasingly distrustful of many successful people, white or black. This was also the group within the African American community that has most recently responded to the message of manhood, greater family responsibility, and black pride. Farrakhan provided hope for many working-class African Americans, who used the march to demonstrate their rage against and resentment of many mainstream Americans, black and white, who argued that African Americans should stay away from the march and that Farrakhan and Chavis were nothing more than two racist and sexist hatemongers who epitomized everything that was negative about black nationalism. On the contrary, for many African Americans in this socioeconomic class, these two men embodied all that was absent in their lives. Farrakhan and Chavis were able to tap into the hopelessness, despair, and uncertainty that many of these men felt. Despite opposition, even the Million Man March’s detractors conceded that the event was a success. The march put the spotlight on African American men and gave Farrakhan a renewed sense of visibility and importance. Elwood David Watson Further Reading Scott Minerbrook’s article in U.S. News & World Report, “The Right Man for the Job?” (October 16, 1995), debated whether Farrakhan had the moral and political resources to be a spokesperson for a march of one million men. Sylvester Monroe, in his Time magazine article “The Mirage of Farrakhan” (October 30, 1995), discussed the ambivalence that many Americans, both black and white, harbored toward Farrakhan. In the October 23, 1995, article “A Million Men, Minus One,” Time magazine journalist Jack White criticized and dismissed Farrakhan and discussed his boycotting of the event. In the October 16, 1995, article “Marching to Farrakhan,” Time magazine journalist David Van Biema talked about the events surrounding the Million Man March. Eric Pooley in his Time magazine article, “To the

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Beat of His Drum” (October 23, 1995), argued that Farrakhan had forced the nation to acknowledge the force he has in black America. The Time magazine piece “I, Too, Sing America” (October 30, 1995) examined the sociological impact that the march had on African American men. The October 9, 1995, Newsweek magazine article “Farrakhan on the March,” written by Vern E. Smith and Steven Waldman, discussed how Farrakhan attempted to give exposure to the voice of a silent majority, the black underclass. See also Birmingham March; Black nationalism; Million Woman March; Nation of Islam; Poor People’s March on Washington; Selma-Montgomery march

Million Woman March The Event: Gathering together of hundreds of thousands of black women from all over the world Date: October 25, 1997 Place: Philadelphia, Pennsylvania The second in a series of African American activist marches in the late 1990’s, the Million Woman March targeted empowerment and unity in the African American community. The Million Woman March took place on October 25, 1997, in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Organized by Philé Chionesu, the owner of an African artifacts store in Philadelphia, and Asia Coney, president of the Tasker Tenant Improvement Council in Philadelphia, the march created a network of African American women community activists. These women took on positions of leadership such as national cochair and regional coordinator in order to rally African American women to demonstrate their commitment to solving the problems that faced African Americans at the end of the twentieth century. Although the march was not organized through a religious organization, it was inspired by the October 16, 1995, Million Man March organized by the Muslim minister Louis Farrakhan of the

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Nation of Islam. Philadelphia was selected as the destination because it is where the Declaration of Independence was signed. Organizers wanted African American women to make their own declaration of independence from poverty, discrimination, enslavement, and abuse. The march used grassroots organization and publicity, relying on word of mouth, the Internet, and black media sources instead of corporate sponsorship and mainstream television and print media. Two years earlier, many African American women had supported the Million Man March, deferring to Farrakhan’s request that women refrain from attending the march to avoid unnecessary distraction. However, many African American women were eager to have their turn to demonstrate their commitment to bettering the lives of black people, and the Million Woman March provided just such an opportunity. A Day for Women A complete program of events was designed to reinforce the motto of the October 25 march: Great Grandmother Taught Grandmother. Grandmother Taught Mother. Mother Taught Me. I Will Teach You. The march began with a 6 a.m. spiritual ceremony at Penn’s Landing, a site on the waterfront of the Delaware River regarded as sacred by some African Americans because it is where Africans were bought and sold after reaching the colony of Philadelphia. Accompanied by the traditional rhythms of an African drum procession, participants marched two miles from Penn’s Landing to the steps of the Philadelphia Museum of Art. The Million Woman March addressed a wide variety of themes and issues, including sisterhood, positive relationships with men, domestic violence, women’s health, incarceration of women, family, independent African American schools, leadership, global human rights, and the Central Intelligence Agency’s possible role in crack cocaine trafficking in the inner cities. The march’s mission statement highlighted these concerns, as well as a reaffirmation of women’s roles as mothers, as nurturers, and as protectors of life. The march also addressed the African American woman’s role in rebuilding deteriorated African American neighborhoods.

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The seven-hour-long official program featured a diverse range of prominent black women in fields ranging from politics to religion, to music and the arts, and to activism. These speakers included Congresswoman Maxine Waters; Ilyassah and Camilla Shabazz, daughters of 1960’s activist Malcolm X; actress Jada Pinkett; rapper and social activist Sister Souljah; singer-songwriter Faith Evans; Afeni Shakur, the mother of hip-hop artist Tupac Shakur; Pam and Ramona Africa of Philadelphia’s MOVE organization; and Khadijah Farrakhan, wife of Louis Farrakhan. South African political activist Winnie Mandela gave the keynote address. Her international fame as the politically active former wife of South African president Nelson Mandela lent an air of internationalism to the march and added to its significance. Not all march participants were black women: Bettye Mae Jumper of the Native American Tribal Council gave the program’s prayer of unity. Organizers estimated that 2.1 million people convened in Philadelphia to support the march. Philadelphia police estimates range from 300,000 to one million attendees. Consequences Many participants attended the march because they wanted to become a part of history. Women also attended the event to meet new people, exchange ideas, network, and see the faces of the hundreds of thousands of women whose daily lives are occupied with solving problems that affect the African American community. It is difficult to measure the exact impact of the march in real terms, but it is likely that the march at least served as a symbol to the world that African American women are leaders who are actively concerned with the progress of their communities. March leaders hoped that the image of hundreds of thousands of African American women gathered together to express their political power sent a positive message to the world that helped eliminate negative stereotypes of African American women. They also hoped it would heighten awareness of the difficulties of battling both sexism and racism. The utility of march events such as the Million Woman March is the subject of debate. Critics question whether the money spent on travel, hotels, and souvenirs and the time involved in plan-

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ning and attending the event could be put toward more tangible gains. For example, officials from the Philadelphia Convention and Visitors Bureau said that the march generated $21.7 million dollars for the city. What would happen, they ask, if the participants donated the equivalent of these expenses toward an African American social, political, educational, or economic cause instead of marching? The most consistent criticism is that it is difficult for a march to produce concrete achievements. The Internet has provided one of the best means for maintaining the spirit of the Million Woman March and the networks it generated. African American women created forums, newsletters, and other opportunities for discussion of the march. In addition, African American women supported similar events such as the African American-centered 1998 Million Youth March in Harlem, New York; the unified, multiracial Million Mom March held in May, 2000, in Washington, D.C.; and the Nation of Islamsponsored Million Family March in Washington, D.C., held in October, 2000. Christel N. Temple See also Birmingham March; Colored Women’s League; Combahee River Collective; Million Man March; Nation of Islam; National Association of Colored Women; National Black Women’s Political Leadership Caucus; Poor People’s March on Washington; Selma-Montgomery march

Miscegenation laws Definition: State laws forbidding intermarriage between black and white people State miscegenation laws were examples of explicit racial discrimination in U.S. statutory law; they criminalized and penalized the unions of persons of differing racial heritages and denied legal legitimacy to mixed-race children born to such interracial couples. Thirty-eight U.S. states at one time had miscegenation laws in force; seven of those thirty-eight repealed their laws before 1900.

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All southern states (not including the District of Columbia) had miscegenation statutes. Many western states (including Arizona, California, Montana, Nevada, Oregon, Utah, and Wyoming), in addition to forbidding intermarriage between black and white people, also specifically prohibited unions between whites and Native Americans or whites and Asian Americans. Penalties upon conviction varied from a maximum imprisonment of more than two years in most of the South and some other states (ten years in Florida, Indiana, Maryland, Mississippi, and North Carolina) to sentences ranging between a few months and two years in other states. Enforcement of the laws was random and irregular. The key case in ending miscegenation laws was Loving v. Virginia (1967). At the time that the U.S. Supreme Court heard the Loving case, sixteen states still had miscegenation laws in force. Virginia’s laws dealing with racial intermarriage were among the nation’s oldest. They stemmed from statutes formulated in the colonial period (1691) and had been strengthened by more stringent miscegenation legislation passed in the mid-1920’s in which whiteness was very narrowly defined. The codes that became law in 1924 were aimed primarily at discriminating against people of mixed African American and white heritage and/or of American Indian background. In the Loving case, Richard Perry Loving, who was white, had married Mildred Delores Jester, who was African American, in Washington, D.C., in June, 1958. The Lovings made their home between Fredericksburg and Richmond in Caroline County, Virginia. They were issued warrants of arrest in July, 1958, and in January, 1959, they were convicted before the Caroline County court of violating Virginia’s antimiscegenation statute. Their minimum sentences (of one year imprisonment each) were suspended on agreement that they would leave the state. They moved to Washington, D.C., until 1963, when they returned to their farm in Virginia and worked with attorneys Bernard Cohen and Philip Hirschkop of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), who placed their case under appeal. The miscegenation law and the Lovings’ convictions were upheld by the Virginia Supreme Court of Appeals in March, 1966, but in June, 1967, the U.S.

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Antimiscegenation tract published in the North during the 1860’s. (Library of Congress)

Supreme Court overruled the appellate finding. The Supreme Court ruled that use of race as a basis for prohibiting marriage rights was unconstitutional under the Fourteenth Amendment’s equal protection and due process provisions. The ruling nullified all remaining laws forbidding interracial marriage. Previous to the unanimous 1967 ruling, the U.S. Supreme Court had taken a conservative approach to this civil rights issue. It had repeatedly avoided reviewing lower court convictions based on state antimiscegenation laws (Jackson v. Alabama, 1954; Naim v. Naim, 1955; McLaughlin v. Florida, 1964). Barbara Bair Further Reading Gay, Kathlyn. The Rainbow Effect: Interracial Families. Danbury, Conn.: Grolier, 1987. Sociological study of interracial marriages, with emphasis on the children of such marriages and their complex racial identity.

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McNamara, Robert P., Maria Tempenis, and Beth Walton. Crossing the Line: Interracial Couples in the South. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1999. A scholarly sociological and historical study of interracial marriages. Moran, Rachel F. Interracial Intimacy: The Regulation of Race and Romance. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001. Argues that historically, laws against interracial marriage sought to buttress white privilege. Although such laws no longer exist, racism makes same-race marriages the norm, with Asian American men and African American women bearing the brunt of restricted marriage opportunities. Robinson, Charles Frank, II. Dangerous Liaisons: Sex and Love in the Segregated South. Fayetteville: University of Arkansas Press, 2003. Scholarly study of interracial couples, often unmarried, in the American South throughout history. See also Jim Crow laws; One-drop rule

Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party Identification: Alternative political party Date: Founded on April 24, 1964 Place: Jackson, Mississippi Its aim was to enable African Americans to participate fully in the Mississippi state political process. Mississippi’s 1890 constitution had disfranchised its African American citizens, allowing only a tiny percent to register to vote. Potential voters were prevented from exercising their rights through intimidation and taxes at the polls and registration laws requiring applicants to read and copy any section of the state constitution on request, give a “reasonable” interpretation of the section, and demonstrate a “reasonable” understanding of the duties and obligations of citizenship under a constitutional form of government. Illiterate whites often passed by just “signing the book,” however, African Americans were often told they had

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failed but were not permitted to see test results. In the mid-1950’s, an effort to restrict registration even further by adding a “good moral character” requirement was initiated in response to the U.S. Supreme Court school desegregation ruling; this amendment was successful in 1962. The Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party (MFDP) was founded in April, 1964, in Jackson, Mississippi, by African Americans as an alternative to a segregationist state Democratic Party. Profoundly grassroots in both promise and practice, the MFDP was chaired by Lawrence Guyot with vice chair Ed King; its legal council was attorney Arthur Kinoy. It pledged loyalty to the National Democratic Party and sought its base among poor Mississippians of all races. In the summer and fall of 1964, MFDP “freedom registrars,” building on a fall, 1963, voter registration campaign, collected more than sixty thousand registrations on simplified unofficial forms. The MFDP and others also worked under the umbrella of the Council of Federated Organizations (COFO) to help people register on official rolls. Prevented from participating in the regu-

Efforts to promote African American suffrage in Mississippi go back to the 1950’s, when voter education classes were conducted in churches to prepare people for the state’s voter registration test. (Library of Congress)

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lar Democratic state convention, the MFDP held its own state convention on July 26, 1964, and elected delegates and alternates to the Democratic National Convention. The MFDP also nominated the first African American candidates to run for Congress since Reconstruction: Fannie Lou Hamer, Second District; Annie Devine, Fourth District; and Victoria Gray, Fifth District. The Democratic National Convention At the Democratic National Convention in Atlantic City in August, the MFDP challenged seating of the official delegation from Mississippi. Televised coverage of the MFDP’s activities at the Democratic National Convention favorably affected public perception of the justice of the group’s challenge. However, its challenge was rejected by the party’s credentials committee. In turn, the MFDP rejected a proposed compromise, linked to Hubert Humphrey, that promised that the Democratic Party would seat a racially balanced Mississippi delegation in 1968. In January, 1965, the MFDP challenged the seating of Mississippi’s newly elected congressional delegation. Depositions about voting irregularities collected in support of that challenge during the following months further publicly disgraced the state’s segregationist political leadership although the MFDP’s congressional challenge finally died in a House vote on September 17, 1965. The MFDP failed to unseat the official delegation at the 1964 Democratic National Convention but was effective in local consciousness raising and in increasing national disaffection with Mississippi’s segregationist voter registration practices. In April, 1965, a federal court injunction ordered Sunflower County’s registrar to operate on a nondiscriminatory basis. In August, 1965, Mississippi reformed its voter registration application process. Mississippians of all races began to register with increasing success, and racial diversity increased among elected officials. In 1968, a racially integrated Mississippi delegation was seated, as promised, at the Democratic National Convention. The MFDP was absorbed into a liberal coalition known as the Mississippi Loyal Democrats in 1968. By the late 1970’s, there were more African Americans registered in Mississippi than in any other state. Barbara Roos

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Further Reading More information on the party can be found in the U.S. Government publication “Restrictions on Negro Voting in Mississippi History: Appendix to Brief of ACLU, Amicus Curiae,” Publication No. 73 of the Supreme Court of the United States, October Term, 1964. See also Civil Rights movement; Council of Federated Organizations; Freedom Summer; Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee; Voting Rights Act of 1965

Missouri Compromise The Event: Agreement within the U.S. Congress designed to pacify both northern and southern sectional interests by balancing the number of slave and free states admitted to the Union Date: Settled on March 3, 1820 The Missouri Compromise would stand for thirty-five years. During that time it served to mark a clear delineation between the growing regional and sectional problems of the North and South. Between 1818 and 1819 both the territories of Missouri and Maine petitioned the U.S. Congress to be admitted as new states. The Missouri Territory had been created from the Louisiana Purchase (1803) and was promised constitutional protection. However, Congress could not decide if the right of property applied to the institution of slavery. Should it be allowed in Missouri and the rest of the Louisiana Purchase, or did Congress have the moral responsibility to rectify the issue of slavery that had been avoided since the Constitutional Convention of 1787? It would take three sessions of Congress between 1818 and 1821 before Missouri was fully admitted as a state. The issue of slavery sparked by the ensuing debate spread throughout the country and threatened to cause disunion between the northern and southern regions. Background At the time Missouri and Maine applied for statehood, the United States consisted of eleven free states and eleven slave

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states. This political balance had been achieved since 1789 by admitting a slave state and then a free state determined by geographical location and each region’s past history with regard to slavery. This arrangement supplied each section with an equal number of senators (two per state) and attempted to equalize representation in the House of Representatives through the threefifths clause. The three-fifths clause, added to the final draft of the Constitution, allowed slave states to count each slave as three-fifths of a person to balance their representative power against that of the more densely populated North. Nevertheless, the North had a majority of representatives in Congress (105 to 81). Missouri’s admission as a free or slave state therefore became an important issue in the very body that would resolve it. Missouri threatened to extend the influence of the industrial free North in the Senate or provide the majority to the agrarian slaveholding South. In 1818, Missouri’s boundaries were approximately the same as those of today, and the territory was estimated to have 2,000 to 3,000 slaves. Slavery was a historical by-product of prior French and Spanish colonial policies. Missouri reasoned that slavery should be allowed to continue as it had in other territories that had been granted statehood since 1789. In February, 1819, the House of Representatives responded to this debate by adopting the Tallmadge amendment. Representative James Tallmadge of New York proposed an amendment to the bill allowing Missouri to frame a state constitution. The two clauses in the amendment would restrict the further introduction of slavery into Missouri and provide that all children born to slaves would be free at age twenty-five. Both clauses passed the House. Southern senators were shocked by the bitterness of the debate in the House and the ability of the North to muster votes. They saw the Tallmadge amendment as the first step in eliminating the expansion of slavery. Voting along sectional lines, the Senate rejected both clauses. Congress adjourned session until December 6, 1819. During this interim, Maine formed a constitution and applied for admission as a free state. Maine had been incorporated into the Massachusetts Bay Colony in 1691 but had started to agitate for separate

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statehood during and after the War of 1812. Its application for statehood as a free state seemed to provide a possible solution to the Missouri debate that threatened the stability of the young nation. On February 18, 1820, the Senate Judiciary Committee joined the two measures and the Senate passed Maine’s and Missouri’s applications for statehood but without mentioning slavery. This infuriated Maine which had, as part of Massachusetts, outlawed slavery in 1780. What should have been a routine confirmation of new states became part of the most explosive issue to face the country. Maine would be allowed to separate from Massachusetts and gain statehood as long as Congress approved it by March 4, 1820, or the nine counties would revert back to Massachusetts. Even so, many of Maine’s constituency urged that Maine’s application fail so that slavery would not spread into Missouri. The Final Debate Senator J. B. Thomas of Illinois offered a compromise amendment to the Senate bill that would admit Missouri as a slave state with the proviso that the remaining territories in the Louisiana Purchase above 36° latitude, Missouri’s southern border, would be free of slavery. The northern-controlled House responded by rejecting this Thomas amendment and passed a proviso prohibiting the further introduction of slavery anywhere. The result was polarization along sectional lines. In turn, the Senate struck out the antislavery provision and added the Thomas amendment. Thus began the final debate over whether slavery would be allowed to expand. Senator Rufus King of New York continued the debate by stating that Congress, under Article IV, section 3 of the Constitution, was empowered to exclude slavery from the territory and to make slavery an issue for statehood. “New states may be admitted by the Congress into this Union.” A precedent had been established under Article IV, section 3 of the Constitution which forbade slavery in lands above the Ohio River in the Northwest Ordinance of 1787. Therefore, in the minds of many of the northern congressmen, they should take this opportunity to eliminate slavery from any point west of the Mississippi. In response, Senator William Pickering of Maryland stated that the United States

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Missouri’s application for U.S. statehood threatened the balance between free and slave states and raised the issue of how to handle slavery in the growing Western territories. Finally Congress voted to admit Maine as a free state and Missouri as a slave state and restricted slavery north of 36°30 . This compromise arrangement would stand until 1857, but the seeds of sectional conflict were already sown.

was composed of an equal number of slave states and free states; Missouri should be allowed to determine its own fate. Missouri responded with anger and frustration, asserting that the issue was not about slavery but rather the issue of state sovereignty. Congress had delayed its admission for years. Missouri, like other states, had the right to choose its property laws. In Missouri as well as the rest of the South, the issue swung from one dealing with slavery to one dealing with property rights and the equality of states within the United States. These issues captured the attention of citizens throughout the country and led to heated debates on all levels. For the first time, slavery was being justified and defended as a good way of life by not only southern politicians but also the southern clergy. Would the country be influenced by restrictionists who sought to control this institution, or would states’ rights be preserved?

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A compromise was eventually reached, between the two houses, in a conference formed to break the deadlock. Speaker of the House Henry Clay of Kentucky stated that he would not support Maine’s admission unless Missouri was admitted with no restrictions. The Senate took the House bill and inserted the Thomas amendment. The House under Henry Clay’s leadership voted to admit Maine as a free state and Missouri as a slave state and restricted slavery north of 36° latitude. It is interesting to note that seven of Maine’s nine representatives in the Massachusetts delegation voted against Maine’s admission so that their state would not be used to provide a solution to the slavery issue. Impact Missouri continued to be an issue when it presented a state constitution in November, 1820. As if to get the final word, the Missouri constitutional convention had incorporated into its constitution a provision excluding free blacks and mulattoes from the state. This provision incited the antislavery factions in the Senate and House and threatened to destroy the fragile compromise. A “Second Missouri Compromise” was needed which stated that Missouri would not gain admission as a state unless its legislature assured Congress that it would not seek to abridge the rights of citizens. The Missouri legislature agreed to this in June, 1821. On August 10, 1821, President James Monroe admitted Missouri as the twenty-fourth state. After waiting a short time, Missouri’s state congress sought to have the last say when it approved statutes forbidding free blacks from entering the state. The Missouri Compromise would stand for thirty-five years. During that time it served to mark a clear delineation between the growing regional and sectional problems of the North and South and made states’ rights the rallying cry for the South until the Civil War. Vincent Michael Thur Further Reading Brown, Richard H. The Missouri Compromise: Political Statesmanship or Unwise Evasion? Boston: D. C. Heath, 1964. Contains

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primary source material showing views of contemporary leaders and varying perspectives of historians. Clark, Charles E. Maine: A Bicentennial History. New York: W. W. Norton, 1977. Condensed overview of Maine history. Index, annotated bibliography, and footnotes. Commager, Henry Steele, ed. Documents of American History. New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts, 1958. Compilation of major American historical documents accompanied by commentary. Hurt, R. Douglas. Agriculture and Slavery in Missouri’s Little Dixie. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1992. A study of the political and legal impact of the Missouri Compromise during the antebellum era in a seven-county area along the Missouri River. McPherson, James M. The Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era. Oxford, England: Oxford University Press, 1988. Definitive perspective on the sectional differences leading up to and through the Civil War era. Extensive annotated bibliography, footnotes, and index. Moore, Glover. The Missouri Controversy, 1819-1821. Gloucester, Mass.: Peter Smith, 1967. A significant monograph on the political compromise that signaled nineteenth century sectional controversies during the antebellum era. Nagel, Paul C. Missouri: A Bicentennial History. New York: W. W. Norton, 1977. Condensed overview of Missouri history by a leading historian. Annotated bibliography, footnotes, and index. Nash, Gary B., ed. The American People: Creating a Nation and a Society. 2d ed. New York: Harper & Row, 1990. Overview of American history that places the Missouri Compromise in a national historical context. Index. See also Antislavery laws of 1777 and 1807; Bleeding Kansas; Civil War; Compromise of 1850; Fugitive Slave Law of 1793; Fugitive Slave Law of 1850; Harpers Ferry raid; Kansas-Nebraska Act; Northwest Ordinance; Proslavery argument; Scott v. Sandford; Slave codes; Slavery and the justice system

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Missouri ex rel. Gaines v. Canada The Case: U.S. Supreme Court ruling on the separate but equal doctrine Date: December 12, 1938 Chipping away at the separate but equal doctrine, the Supreme Court ruled that states must provide equal opportunities for legal education within the borders of the state. The state of Missouri, like other southern states, had no law schools that admitted African Americans. The state claimed to provide separate but equal opportunity by offering a few scholarships to help pay expenses for African Americans to attend law schools in other states. The state also indicated that it would begin a separate law school for African Americans if there were sufficient demand. Lloyd Gaines, an African American resident of the state, sued the registrar of the University of Missouri, S. W. Canada, after being denied admission to the law school because of his race. By a 6-2 vote, the Supreme Court held that the University of Missouri’s scholarship policy fell short of the demands of the equal protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. Chief Justice Charles Evans Hughes, for the majority, wrote that the policy denied African Americans the equal right to obtain a legal education without leaving the state. Hughes noted that the state, if it wished, might fulfill its constitutional obligations “by furnishing equal facilities in separate schools.” The Gaines decision suggested that the Court would henceforth disapprove of segregated schools unless they met standards of near-absolute equality. In Sweatt v. Painter (1950), the Court built upon Gaines when it held that an all-black law school in Texas was inadequate because it did not provide “substantial equality” of educational opportunities available to white persons. Thomas Tandy Lewis See also Education; Segregation; Separate but equal doctrine

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Mobile v. Bolden The Case: U.S. Supreme Court ruling on one person, one vote concept Date: April 22, 1980 Reaffirming that the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments prohibit only “purposeful discrimination,” the Supreme Court upheld an at-large system of voting in which no African American had ever been elected. The three-member city commission of Mobile, Alabama, had been elected on a citywide basis since 1911. Although African Americans made up almost 40 percent of the population, none had ever been elected to the commission. A district court found that the at-large system was unconstitutional, but the Supreme Court, by a 6-3 margin, reversed the judgment. In evaluating Mobile’s electoral system according to the demands of the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments, Justice Potter Stewart’s plurality opinion simply followed the Court’s many precedents indicating that a state policy that is neutral on its face does not violate the Constitution unless it is “motivated by a racially discriminatory purpose.” In an angry dissent, Justice Thurgood Marshall accused the Court of being “an accessory to the perpetuation of racial discrimination” and argued that voting rights should be judged according to a discriminatory effects test rather than a discriminatory intent standard. In Rogers v. Lodge (1982), the Court used the Bolden standard to strike down an at-large electoral scheme in Georgia. The Court’s ruling in Bolden, however, became almost irrelevant after Congress passed the 1982 extension of the Voting Rights Act, which allows plaintiffs to prevail in voting dilution cases on the basis of a modified discriminatory effects test. Thomas Tandy Lewis See also Fifteenth Amendment; Fourteenth Amendment; Voting Rights Act of 1965; Voting Rights Act of 1975

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Montgomery bus boycott The Event: First major effort by African Americans to fight entrenched discrimination Date: December 5, 1955-December 17, 1956 Place: Montgomery, Alabama The Montgomery bus boycott of 1955 and 1956, through economic sanctions, sparked the early Civil Rights movement. When the Supreme Court issued its decision in Brown v. Board of Education in May, 1954, ruling that racial segregation in public schools was unconstitutional, it marked the beginning of a period of dramatic change in the relationships between African Americans and whites. Until the mid-1960’s, that change was hastened by the organized nonviolent resistance by many African Americans to laws and conditions that they regarded as discriminatory. The first occasion in which such tactics proved successful was a boycott of public buses in Montgomery, Alabama. Although African Americans had achieved some hard-fought successes before 1954—most notably the desegregation of the armed forces—in many respects they remained a separate community, enjoying fewer rights and opportunities and less legal protection than whites. This was especially true in the Deep South, where the doctrine of “separate but equal” was held to apply to most areas of daily life and was used to justify a decidedly unequal segregation. Hundreds of laws, many of them passed in the late nineteenth century, restricted the rights of black southerners to eat, travel, study, or worship with whites. The school desegregation ruling brought no immediate change to race relations in Montgomery. Once the capital of the Confederacy, this city of about 130,000 people—50,000 of whom were African American—continued resolutely in the old pattern of racial separation. The African American community of Montgomery had undertaken initial steps to challenge certain local segregation practices that were particularly offensive. E. D. Nixon of Montgomery headed the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) in Alabama. Because

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he worked as a sleeping-car porter, a unionized profession, he was less susceptible to attempts by the white establishment to control his behavior by threatening his job. Jo Ann Robinson helped lead the African American clubwomen in Montgomery, who provided a powerful organizational backbone among the small African American middle class in Montgomery. This nascent movement still lacked both a unified structure and a single issue to mobilize the African American community to push for civil rights.

Rosa Parks, whose refusal to give up her bus seat to a white man helped trigger the modern Civil Rights movement. (Library of Congress)

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Rosa Parks’s Arrest The issue came to a head on December 1, 1955, when Rosa Parks, a seamstress at a Montgomery department store and formerly the secretary of the local NAACP chapter, refused to give up her seat to maintain a row of vacant seats between white and black riders on the public bus system in Montgomery, as required by law. She was arrested and charged with violating the segregation ordinance. Parks’s action was in part spontaneous—she had not boarded the bus with the intent to violate any segregation ordinance. Yet she had attended the Highlander Folk School in Tennessee, where members of the community learned to become more effective, and a lifetime of enduring racial indignities had made her acutely aware of the evil nature of segregation. Immediately, Montgomery’s African American community sprang into action. Fred Gray, one of but four black lawyers in Alabama, contacted Clifford Durr, a liberal white attorney, to post bail for Parks. Nixon brought together two ministers, Ralph Abernathy and Martin Luther King, Jr., with Jo Ann Robinson to plan for a massive boycott of Montgomery public buses, a majority of whose riders were African American. It would be necessary to arrange for transportation for scores of African Americans who did not own cars. To coordinate the massive undertaking, Montgomery’s African American leaders created the Montgomery Improvement Association (MIA), presided over by King, the twenty-six-year-old pastor of Dexter Avenue Baptist Church. The boycott began on December 5, 1955. The Response to the Boycott At first, whites reacted with indifference or amusement, until the bus company’s revenues dropped by 75 percent. A series of meetings between the city commissioners, representatives of the bus company, and the MIA failed to produce any agreement on the African Americans’ demands—courteous treatment by bus drivers; a first-come, first-served seating arrangement, with black passengers filling the rear seats and whites the front seats of buses; and the employment of African American drivers on routes that served predominantly African American neighborhoods of Montgomery. Instead, the city police department began

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to harass the carpools that had been set up by the MIA to provide alternative transportation, and they arrested some of the drivers. Police officers arrested King himself for speeding, and on January 30, persons unknown blasted King’s house with dynamite. The houses of two other boycott leaders met a similar fate. These acts of violence and intimidation affected the course of events in several ways. First, they united the African Americans in Montgomery, inspiring them to continue the boycott for more than a year. The violence also attracted national attention to Montgomery and led to substantial outside support for the boycott, assistance vital to its success. Finally, the violence served as a foil for the rhetoric of nonviolent resistance that King so eloquently articulated. In one mass meeting after another, he urged his followers to ignore hostile provocations, to confront their persecutors passively, and to refuse to fight back, relying on the moral authority of their actions to sway the hearts and minds of their antagonists. While the boycott continued, the legal issues it raised were argued in federal courts. On February 1, 1956, five Montgomery women filed suit to have the Court strike down the city bus seating ordinance. The case was heard on May 11, by which time eighty-nine MIA members faced local charges for conspiracy to interfere with normal business. In November, city officials obtained an injunction against the MIA officials for running a carpool, which nearly brought the boycott to a halt. Nevertheless, the federal suit received a favorable hearing and was affirmed by the Supreme Court in Browder v. Gayle in November, and the Court ordered the seating on Montgomery buses desegregated on December 17, 1956. Four days later, King, Abernathy, and Nixon rode the bus downtown and were able to sit wherever they wanted. Results of the Boycott The boycott succeeded for a number of reasons, not the least of which was the timely court ruling. It also benefited from fissures in the white community across gender, age, and economic lines. White, middle-class women often transported their black maids to and from work, unwittingly aiding the boycott. Within the

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Chamber of Commerce, a coalition of young businessmen called the Men of Montgomery demanded that the city fathers end the boycott because the city’s tarnished image made it difficult to attract outside businesses. Successful in its immediate objective, the boycott established a precedent for other economic protests over the next decade. Because of his role in the boycott, Martin Luther King, Jr., emerged as the most important spokesperson for African Americans. His tactics of nonviolent passive resistance remained the major tool of the Civil Rights movement until the mid-1960’s. Shortly after the boycott’s conclusion, King was instrumental in founding the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, which applied the Montgomery formula to other southern cities. African American leaders tried nonviolent resistance and economic protests in Birmingham, Alabama, and Albany, Georgia. The Montgomery bus boycott was an important harbinger of the most profound social changes in the United States during the 1960’s, in that it marked a change in the attitudes and strategies of African Americans to confront racial indignity. Courtney B. Ross Updated by Edward R. Crowther Further Reading David J. Garrow’s Bearing the Cross: Martin Luther King, Jr., and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (New York: William Morrow, 1986) is a thorough, detailed biography of King that provides an excellent account of King’s Montgomery days. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s Stride Toward Freedom: The Montgomery Story (New York: Harper & Row, 1958) is King’s own account of the boycott. Jo Ann Gibson Robinson’s The Montgomery Bus Boycott and the Women Who Started It: The Memoir of Jo Ann Gibson Robinson (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1987) provides a powerful portrait of the world of middle-class women in Montgomery and the essential role they played in the boycott strategy. See also Brown v. Board of Education; Civil Rights movement; Congress of Racial Equality; “I Have a Dream” speech; King assassi-

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nation; Little Rock school desegregation crisis; National Association for the Advancement of Colored People v. Alabama; Southern Christian Leadership Conference; University of Mississippi desegregation; White Citizens’ Councils

Moore v. Dempsey The Case: U.S. Supreme Court ruling on trial by jury and habeas corpus Date: February 19, 1923 The landmark Moore decision marked two constitutional developments: the Supreme Court’s actual utilization of the due process clause of the Fourteenth Amendment as a limitation on state criminal proceedings and the federal courts’ supervision of state proceedings by way of habeas corpus petitions. In 1919 a violent racial clash in Phillips County, Arkansas, resulted in the deaths of scores of African Americans and five whites. More than one hundred African Americans, and no whites, were prosecuted. Swift trials took place in a lynch-mob atmosphere, with large angry crowds intimidating the juries. Six defendants sentenced to death petitioned the federal district court for a habeas corpus hearing. As recently as Frank v. Mangum (1915), however, the Supreme Court had refused federal relief for a defendant convicted of murder in state court under mob-influenced conditions similar to those of Phillips County. Therefore, the district court dismissed the petition. By a 6-2 vote, the Supreme Court reversed the ruling and instructed the lower court to hold a habeas corpus hearing. Speaking for the Court, Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes observed that a trial influenced by the threat of mob violence was manifestly inconsistent with the constitutional requirements for due process of law. The state courts had the obligation to guarantee fair trials for the defendants, but if evidence indicated a failure to meet this obligation, the federal courts then had the duty to review the record and determine whether the convictions should be overturned. The two dissenters expressed concern that the

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ruling would result in excessive federal interference in state proceedings. Thomas Tandy Lewis See also Batson v. Kentucky; Edmonson v. Leesville Concrete Company; Powers v. Ohio

Moose Lodge v. Irvis The Case: U.S. Supreme Court ruling on state action and private discrimination Date: June 12, 1972 The Supreme Court held that a state agency did not violate the equal protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment when it issued a liquor license to a private club that practiced racial discrimination. Moose Lodge No. 107, a private club in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, allowed only white men to use its premises. One member of the club tried to bring Leroy Irvis, a prominent African American politician, as a guest. After Irvis was refused service, he brought a civil suit in federal court. He contended that the state, by providing the club with a license, was unconstitutionally participating in the club’s policy of racial exclusion. Irvis pointed to Burton v. Wilmington Parking Authority (1961), in which the Court had ruled that a state agency did not have the right to lease property to a restaurant practicing racial segregation. By a 6-3 vote, the Supreme Court rejected Irvis’s claim. Speaking for the majority, Justice William H. Rehnquist interpreted the doctrine of state action narrowly and concluded that the mere licensing of the lodge did not constitute enough state involvement to bring the lodge’s policies under the umbrella of the Fourteenth Amendment. The state played “absolutely no part” in determining the membership or guest policies of organizations receiving state licenses. The circumstances were considered different from the “symbiotic relationship” that had existed between a lessor and a lessee in the Burton case. Because states commonly provide regulations for many necessary services, Rehnquist

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feared that a ruling upholding Irvis’s claim would “utterly emasculate” the long-standing distinction between private conduct and state action. Dissenting, Justice William J. Brennan, Jr., argued that the state was an “active participant” in the Moose Lodge bar, and he noted that the liquor licensing laws included “pervasive regulatory schemes” for many aspects of the licensee’s business. Justice William O. Douglas emphasized that liquor licenses were very scarce and that therefore the state’s policy restricted the equal access of African Americans to liquor. Ironically, Irvis was able to find recourse under Pennsylvania’s public accommodations law. Thomas Tandy Lewis See also Burton v. Wilmington Parking Authority; Civil Rights cases; Jones v. Alfred H. Mayer Company; Shelley v. Kraemer

MOVE bombing The Event: Bungled attempt to evict illegal squatters Date: May 13, 1985 Place: Philadelphia, Pennsylvania The city of Philadelphia’s use of bombs to remove illegal squatters from a densely crowded neighborhood resulted in eleven deaths and the destruction of sixty-one homes and brought severe criticism down on the city’s government. Founded in 1972 by Vincent Leaphart, who adopted the name “John Africa,” MOVE was a group of “back-to-nature” activists with an unusual and inconsistent philosophy. Although they advocated going back to nature, they were an urban movement. They shunned modern technology but used an elaborate loudspeaker system to bombard neighbors with their views. They decried pollution but littered property with their garbage and human waste. The origin of the term “MOVE” is unclear. Not an acronym, it is generally believed to be merely a shortened form for the term “movement.” MOVE first received media attention in 1978, when Philadelphia police clashed with members when police tried to

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evict them from an illegally occupied house. One police officer was killed, and eight officers and firefighters were wounded. Nine MOVE members were convicted of murder. After failing to win the release of their imprisoned colleagues, MOVE members barricaded their new residence in a middleclass neighborhood, hooked up an elaborate sound system, and bombarded their neighbors for twelve hours per day with their profanity-laced speeches. This continued for more than two years, despite repeated appeals to the city by neighborhood residents. Philadelphia mayor Wilson Goode, that city’s first African American mayor, chose to ignore the appeals of local residents. At one point, Mayor Goode announced that he preferred “to have dirt and some smell than to have death.” The denouement, however, included dirt, smell, and death. The City Takes Aggressive Action After local residents held a press conference on May 1, 1985, criticizing the city’s inaction, city officials decided to take aggressive action. On May 13, 1995, Police Commissioner Gregore Sambor told MOVE members to vacate their two-story row house. Tear gas was fired into the house, and a gun battle commenced. Twelve hours later, MOVE members still occupied the house. Police officials requested and received Mayor Goode’s permission to drop a satchel filled with explosives onto the roof of MOVE’s house. The goal was to dislodge a rooftop bunker; the result, however, was a fire that quickly got out of control. By the time the fires were controlled, eleven MOVE members, including four children, were dead. Only one thirty-year-old woman and one thirteen-year-old boy escaped alive. In addition to the deaths, two city blocks were destroyed, and sixty-one homes were reduced to embers. Newspapers across the nation and throughout the world condemned the mayor’s decision to drop the bomb, but a majority of local residents, both black and white, supported Goode and the police department. By the mid-1990’s, the MOVE bombing had cost Philadelphia $30 million, and legal action was still pending. The city rebuilt the sixty-one destroyed homes, paid settlements to residents for lost belongings, and paid damages to the families

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of slain MOVE members. A 1986 citizens’ commission concluded that Mayor Goode and the police and fire commissioners had “exhibited a reckless disregard for life and property.” Goode was reelected to another four-year term in 1987. See also King beating case; Media; Miami riots

Moynihan Report Identification: Report issued by a social scientist that tried to explain the high levels of poverty in African American communities Date: Published in 1965 This report was received negatively in African American circles. One explanation for high levels of impoverishment in black communities was published in The Negro Family (1965), by Daniel Patrick Moynihan, a white social scientist of Irish descent who later became a U.S. senator. By postulating that “the family structure of the lower-class Negroes is highly unstable,” the Moynihan Report argued that family deterioration was at the heart of high unemployment, welfare dependency, low achievement, and crime. In Moynihan’s view, black communities were enmeshed in a “tangle of pathology.” The report relied heavily on earlier observations by E. Franklin Frazier (1932), who conceptualized lowerclass culture as disorganized and pathological. This thesis has since been used by others who contend that disadvantaged poor and minority groups encourage cultural practices that fuel their continued poverty. Reaction to the Moynihan Report was generally negative on the part of leaders of the Civil Rights movement—especially clear when the report’s conclusions were dismissed by those participating in the November, 1965, meeting of the White House Conference on Civil Rights. The idea that poverty is caused by subcultural patterns has implications for public policy. Instead of focusing on federal efforts to ensure good jobs, housing, education, health care, and income maintenance, those who hold this view focus on improving the character of individuals and fami-

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Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan, pictured here at a press conference in 1969, was President Lyndon Johnson’s assistant Secretary of Labor when he undertook his controversial investigation of the social problems affecting black family life. (Library of Congress)

lies. Critics of the report said that this culture-of-poverty theory was a form of victim blaming that ignored societal and institutional structures—such as unequal access to jobs, segregated education, and unaffordable, deteriorating housing—that make groups who are discriminated against more susceptible to poverty and the problems it causes for families and communities. Poor and minority people have the same values as those in more advantaged sectors of society, but their barriers to achievement are much greater. This culture-of-poverty perspective continues to offend and enrage many people, including African Americans, civil rights workers, and progressive community and government activists. Eleanor A. LaPointe See also Economic trends; Slavery and race relations

Music Throughout the course of North American history, black musicians have drawn from their African heritage and borrowed from outside sources to create a variety of musical genres that have generated interest from multiracial audiences, weakening interracial barriers

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while reinforcing negative or simplistic stereotypes of African Americans.

The history of African American music illustrates an ongoing cultural interaction between African Americans and European Americans from the colonial period through the twentieth century. Through a constant exchange of material, styles, and instrumentation, black and white Americans forged a pluralistic and distinctly American musical culture that survived despite prevailing institutional racism that discouraged cultural interaction. The advent of mass media in the twentieth century resulted in a general breakdown of social, cultural, and regional barriers, thus exposing diverse audiences to black musical styles and catapulting African American music into the cultural mainstream. Early African American Music Africans transported to North America as slaves brought with them a rich musical heritage that included professional and common folk stylings. From the beginning, slaves from various tribal and linguistic backgrounds relied on music as a vehicle for communication and expression and as a means of coping with the physical discomfort and psychological despair of bondage. Distinctively African musical traits such as blue notes and call-andresponse patterns persevered in the music of plantation slaves. The scarcity of African instruments on southern plantations encouraged the development of a cappella vocal music exemplified by the field song and the spiritual, which developed as increasing numbers of slaves became Christians. Both field songs and spirituals used rich imagery and emotional intensity to impart themes of joy, suffering, and longing, often employing double meanings and subtle metaphors as a means of “signifying” the Africans’ true desires and poking fun at their white masters. Slave music often contained hidden social connotations; the cakewalk, an elaborate slave pageant with musical accompaniment held during plantation holiday celebrations, clandestinely ridiculed white mannerisms to the bemusement of both the slaves and unwitting whites.

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Popular Genres of Nineteenth Century Black Music By the 1820’s, white entertainers were performing parodies of slave songs and dances for white American audiences. Blackening their faces with burnt cork and affecting exaggerated “darky” behavior, these performers laid the foundation for the minstrel show, which peaked in popularity just before the Civil War (18611865). The minstrel show exposed white audiences to a diluted form of African American music and produced lasting works by composers such as Daniel Decatur Emmett (author of “Dixie”) and Stephen Foster. Nevertheless, the vitality and poignancy of the best minstrel compositions were eclipsed by the negative images of childish, shiftless black people that defined minstrelsy. The blackface minstrel show declined in popularity following the Civil War as the minstrel style became increasingly associated with black performers seeking to enter show business; as late as the 1920’s, many black performers still called themselves minstrels. Following the Civil War, black musicians made inroads into American popular culture, aided by increased attention from patrons of high art and the migration of black musicians into new geographical regions. Northern missionaries traveling south to minister to freed blacks sparked white interest in African American spirituals through publication in 1867 of a collection entitled Slave Songs of the United States and the organization of the Fisk Jubilee Chorus, a group of nine black youths who in 1871 embarked on a seven-year tour of the United States and Europe that would raise $150,000 to found Fisk University in Nashville, Tennessee. The Jubilee chorus was widely imitated throughout the South as black and white educators sought to raise money for black schools, establishing the place of spirituals in the American mainstream and further eclipsing the minstrel show as a cultural phenomenon. The popularization of African American vocal music through spirituals coincided with the development of various styles of black instrumental music, the most influential of which was ragtime, a multiethnic mixture of folk stylings that rose to popularity in the 1890’s. Although conceived by African Americans, ragtime was from its inception a multiethnic art form influenced by black

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interaction with urban immigrants. Early manifestations of ragtime combined modified Latin rhythms with a European march cadence. Black musicians, with a few notable exceptions such as Scott Joplin, dissociated themselves with ragtime before the turn of the century; nevertheless, ragtime continued to be associated with African Americans, partly because of the readiness of white music publishers and promoters to exploit popular interest in black American culture. By the time Joplin’s “Maple Leaf Rag” was published in 1899, popular white composers were exploiting the ragtime style, and more often the name, for commercial gain. This trend culminated in the production of “coon songs” written by Broadway and Tin Pan Alley composers in a ragtime style with humorous lyrics about “negro life” that perpetuated the mythical stereotype of black people as carefree, childlike, and rhythmic. Jazz and Blues In the late nineteenth century, as ragtime and spirituals defined high black culture and cultivated white audiences, new strains of music reflecting various degrees of African influence developed in the South. Emancipation of slaves after the Civil War created a new mobility among black musicians, who traveled throughout the United States playing in saloons, brothels, juke joints, medicine shows, and minstrel shows, often to white or mixed audiences. From this polyglot of styles emerged two distinct genres that would shape popular music through the twentieth century: jazz and blues. Blues, which flourished in areas with a high black population density such as the Mississippi Delta, set the field song to musical accompaniment by incorporating European and Hawaiian influences into a distinctly African musical framework; jazz, rooted in cosmopolitan New Orleans, resembled ragtime in its multiethnic nature and its emphasis on the African musical devices of syncopation, polyrhythm, and call-and-response. Jazz and blues emerged in the midst of a growing white fascination with African American culture in the early twentieth century. Although jazz was conceived in an interracial environment, the first jazz recordings in 1917 featured the all-white Dixieland

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Jazz Band (the first popular all-black jazz band, the King Oliver Band, first recorded in 1923). By the mid-1920’s, the United States and Europe had become obsessed with jazz. Blues, while less popular among whites than jazz, exerted considerable influence upon white folk musicians (such as Jimmy Rodgers) and attracted the attention of progressive whites through its association with the Harlem Renaissance. The Rise of “Race” Music The commercialization of American music through radio and records in the 1920’s exposed black and white audiences to a wide range of African influenced musical styles, and promoters and performers of this music often sought to enhance their appeal by embracing racial stereotypes. Record companies marketed various black folk styles under the category of “race” music, and radio stations catering to black audiences (but attracting white ones as well) proliferated throughout the South and in urban areas in the North. Black migration to northern cities skyrocketed during World War II, resulting in a mixing of musical styles in urban ghettoes that produced a diverse body of music ranging from the gospel of Malhalia Jackson to the electric blues of Muddy Waters and John Lee Hooker. The Commercial Era The ongoing American obsession with jazz through World War II nurtured an ongoing white fascination with African American culture. In the late 1940’s and early 1950’s, black rhythm and blues enjoyed increasing popularity among white teenagers economically empowered by postwar prosperity. Less cerebral than bebop jazz and less “ethnic” than electric blues, this hybridized, dance-oriented music provided a sound track for the emerging youth culture of mobility and independence. From this culture emerged rock and roll, a culmination of generations of exchange between black and white southern folk music. The arrival of rock and roll in the American mainstream both symbolized and influenced the changing course of race relations in the United States of the 1950’s: Many popular early rock-and-roll performers were African American, and white rockabilly artists such as Elvis Pres-

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ley openly affected black speech and mannerisms; early rockand-roll package tours were interracial and played to interracial audiences. White middle-class objections to the racial liberalism and overt sexuality of rock and roll created a backlash against the music in the late 1950’s that coincided with a white backlash against school desegregation. Yet rock and roll had already broken down barriers that had been weakening for generations. The explosion of rock and roll in the 1960’s catapulted African American music and artists into the mainstream of American culture. By mid-decade, Quincy Jones had become the first African American record label executive, and the distinctive sound of a black-owned record label, Motown, permeated the airwaves of AM radio. The atmosphere of experimentation that defined late1960’s popular culture encouraged a multicultural creative environment in which various styles clashed and merged and interracial groups such as the Jimi Hendrix Experience, Sly and the Family Stone, and Santana symbolized the openness and youthoriented solidarity of the counterculture. The experimental mind-set of the 1960’s combined with a new black consciousness brought new black musical genres to prominence in the 1970’s, from rock-influenced fusion and funk to Afro-Caribbean styles such as dub (a precursor of rap), ska, and reggae, a mixture of calypso and New Orleans rhythm and blues that evoked millennialist religion and black separatism in its lyrics. Meanwhile, the mainstream of black music was dominated by vocal rhythm and blues, which retained much of its early style while incorporating contemporary musical and social themes. From the lighter side of funk and rhythm and blues emerged disco, a predominantly white cultural phenomenon that nevertheless reflected the social diversity of the urban club scene, garnering special appeal among Latino and gay American communities. Late Twentieth Century During the last two decades of the twentieth century, African American music continued to demonstrate an eclecticism and image consciousness reflected in its history and exacerbated by the ever-increasing power of mass media. The 1980’s and 1990’s witnessed greater financial and creative empowerment of African

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Americans in the American music industry, as music videos brought increased exposure for African American music and artists. Nevertheless, the marketing of black music retained its historical penchant for stereotyping: Despite the professed realism of hardcore rap, its images of violence and misogyny exploited white apprehension of and fascination with inner-city African Americans; the enormous popularity of hip-hop—itself a multiplicity of styles—encouraged commercial stereotyping that at times echoed past images of carefree, rhythmic black people. The history of African American music is one of increased popular acceptance and exposure accompanied by a decreased sense of identity. Black musical expression, once regarded as an exotic but exploitable raw material, gradually became yet another entry in the diverse lexicon of American music. Black music at the beginning of the twenty-first century reflected the general eclecticism of the age as well as the obsession with formulas characteristic of the popular music industry; nevertheless, it remained significant as both a reflection and a determinant of American popular culture. Michael H. Burchett Further Reading Race Music: Black Culture from Bebop to Hip-hop. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003) by Guthrie P. Ramsey, Jr., provides a detailed examination of African American music. Robert Palmer’s classic Deep Blues (New York: Viking, 1981) traces the development of African American music from its West African roots to modern rhythm and blues, exposing the continuous exchange between black and white musicians that shaped early American popular music. Samuel A. Floyd, in The Power of Black Music (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995), offers fresh insight into the linkage between African culture and American popular music. John Rublowski’s Black Music in America (New York: Basic Books, 1971) catalogs some African and early African American musical instruments and styles. Chapter 14 of Edward Ayers’s The Promise of the New South (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992) describes the musical environment that spawned ragtime, jazz, and blues in the late nineteenth century. For a dis-

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cussion of the cultural impact of ragtime, see Edward Berlin’s King of Ragtime: Scott Joplin and His Era (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995). Griel Marcus, in Mystery Train (4th rev. ed., New York: Plume, 1997), uses case studies of various artists to discuss contributions of black and white folk music to the development of rock and roll. See also Anderson’s Lincoln Memorial concert; Film history; Great Migration; Harlem Renaissance; Literature; Stereotypes

Nation of Islam Identification: Muslim religious organization Date: Founded in 1930 Place: Detroit, Michigan This organization inculcates black pride and helps elevate African Americans’ social and economic status. The Nation of Islam (NOI) is a religious organization that has successfully melded orthodox Islam, black nationalism, and a set of social and economic principles to produce a highly structured way of life for its African American membership. Founded in 1930 in Detroit, Michigan, the NOI crystallized around three leaders: W. D. Fard, Elijah Muhammad, and Malcolm X. Beliefs The Nation of Islam embraces the essential teachings of orthodox Islam. Both groups stress cleanliness and a strict moral code, and shun alcohol, drug abuse, and eating pork. Early NOI leaders, however, expanded orthodox Islam because of the historic oppression of African Americans. The Nation of Islam is orthodox Islam customized for the African American experience, with solidarity and racial pride being key added features. Black Muslims are required to drop their European last names, associated with enslavement, and adopt the “X” until they earn an Islamic surname. Additional elements, such as advocating a separate nation for its members and teaching about the racist deeds of the “white man,”

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were the source of much outside criticism and prevented the NOI’s acceptance into the official fold of orthodox Islam. History In the midst of Great Depression woes and the past specter of slavery, many African Americans were disillusioned and susceptible to philosophies and leaders who promised improvements. Consequently, a number of nationalistic and religious movements developed. In 1930, W. D. Fard formed the Nation of Islam, which espoused the political nationalism of Jamaican-born Marcus Garvey, who amassed thousands of followers in the United States from 1916 until his imprisonment in 1923 and subsequent deportation. Garvey advocated a separate African American nation, economic and political solidarity, and racial pride. Fard, the first prophet of the Nation of Islam, is shrouded in mystery. Although believed to be from Mecca, his national origins, his real name, and the circumstances of his 1934 disappearance are not known. Fard’s achievements, however, are well documented. In four years during the Great Depression, Fard established the church’s basic philosophy, created a security force known as the Fruit of Islam, opened the University of Islam, built its first temple, and amassed about eight thousand followers. Many of his followers, including Elijah Muhammad, thought Fard to be an incarnation of Allah. After Fard’s sudden disappearance Elijah Muhammad became the group’s leader. Elijah Muhammad was born Elijah Poole in Sandersville, Georgia. His parents had been slaves and sharecroppers. He married Clara Evans in 1919, and during the 1920’s he and his family migrated to Detroit, where he met Fard and became one of his most devoted converts. He was rewarded by being chosen as Fard’s successor, and he transformed Fard’s sincere project into a thriving organization. Elijah Muhammad After Fard’s disappearance, rivalry caused some factionalism and a sharp decrease in NOI membership. Muhammad, often the victim of harassment and death threats, was imprisoned. Consequently, he moved the NOI headquarters from Detroit to Chi-

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Louis Farrakhan, leader of the Nation of Islam, addresses a crowd of more than 20,000 at Madison Square Garden in New York in 1985.

cago, where he was able to rebuild and strengthen the organization. When Muhammad died in 1975, the Nation of Islam had temples and schools from coast to coast; owned a string of restaurants, apartments, and other businesses and real estate; operated a major printing press; and had a membership of more than one hundred thousand. Much of Muhammad’s success, however, can be attributed to one of his ministers, Malcolm X. Malcolm X Malcolm X was born Malcolm Little in Omaha, Nebraska. His parents, Earle and Louise Little, were organizers for Marcus Garvey’s Universal Negro Improvement Association. Because of their views, the Littles were forced to move. They eventually settled in East Lansing, Michigan, where Earle apparently was murdered and Louise had a breakdown. Malcolm wandered between odd jobs and engaged in petty crime. He was imprisoned from 1946 to 1952, and he married Betty Shabazz in 1958. He was murdered in New York on February 21, 1965. In prison, Malcolm became self-educated and converted to Islam. After his release, he met Elijah Muhammad, received his X, and trained for the NOI ministry. He headed temples in several

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cities before becoming the primary spokesperson for the Nation of Islam. His frank speeches and numerous public appearances catapulted the NOI into the national forefront. Membership swelled as a result of Malcolm’s visibility, but his enemies increased also. For unauthorized remarks made about President John F. Kennedy’s assassination, Malcolm was suspended from the NOI. Around that time, he changed his name to El Hajj Malik El-Shabazz. He left the NOI in March, 1964, and formed two new organizations, which were curtailed by his death. After Elijah Muhammad’s death, his son, Warith, also known as Wallace, became the NOI leader. Warith’s changes forced another NOI split, spearheaded by Louis Farrakhan. The NOI expanded under Farrakhan, a controversial figure for some of his adamant and at times incendiary statements. His nondenominational Million Man March in October, 1995, immensely added to his visibility and to some extent mitigated his controversial image. Linda Rochell Lane Further Reading Inside the Nation of Islam: A Historical and Personal Testimony by a Black Muslim. (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2001) by Vibert L. White, Jr., provides an intimate examination of the Nation of Islam. Clayborne Carson’s Malcolm X: The FBI Files (New York: Carroll & Graff, 1991) extracts data from Federal Bureau of Investigation files and provides information on Malcolm X, his family, and the Nation of Islam from 1919 to 1980. John Henrick Clark edited Malcolm X: The Man and His Times (Trenton, N.J.: African World Press, 1990), which contains essays by scholars and personal acquaintances and a chapter in Malcolm’s own words. E. Franklin Frazier’s The Negro Church in America (1963, reprint, New York: Schocken Books, 1974) and C. Eric Lincoln’s The Black Church Since Frazier (New York: Schocken Books, 1974) provide critical background on African American religion. Lincoln’s The Black Muslims in America (Boston: Beacon Press, 1961) is the first complete academic analysis of the Nation of Islam. Thomas W. Lippman, in Understanding Islam (New York: Signet Books, 1982), provides a good start for those with little knowledge of orthodox Islam. In The Autobiography of Malcolm X (New York: Ballantine

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Books, 1965), Malcolm X and Alex Haley tell the story of the African American revolutionary and Black Muslim leader. The beliefs of the Nation of Islam are explained by Elijah Muhammad in The Supreme Wisdom (2 vols., Brooklyn: Temple of Islam, 1957). See also Black Christian Nationalist Movement; “Black Manifesto”; Black nationalism; Black Power movement; Jews and African Americans; Malcolm X assassination; Million Man March; Million Woman March; Niagara Movement; Universal Negro Improvement Association

National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders Identification: Commission created by executive order to study racial violence in American cities Date: Formed in 1967 The commission determined that the principal causes of the riots were widespread discrimination and segregation. The National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders was created by executive order in 1967 with Governor Otto Kerner of Illinois as chairman and Mayor John V. Lindsay of New York City as vice chairman. The commission had eleven members, including four members of Congress as well as labor, civil rights, and law enforcement leaders. Other public officials and private citizens participated on advisory panels studying such things as private enterprise and insurance in riot-affected areas. Racial violence had escalated with the Watts riot in Southern California in 1965 and, by the summer of 1967, was spreading to other American cities. After extensive study, the commission recommended new and expanded employment and educational opportunity programs, national standards for welfare programs, and increased access to housing. The commission’s report stated that the United States was becoming “two societies, one black, one white—separate and unequal.” It was the first major study to place the blame for creating black ghettos on white society.

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The commission studied the major race riots, identified patterns in the violence, developed profiles of participants, and analyzed the conditions prior to and following the disorders. Despite concern among some officials that the violence was being encouraged by radical groups, the commission determined that the principal causes were widespread discrimination and segregation with the increasing concentration of the black population in inner-city ghettos offering little opportunity. These conditions, according to the report, led to pervasive frustration, the acceptance of violence as a means of retaliation, and growing feelings of powerlessness. A spark was all that was necessary to ignite violence, and the police often provided it. The commission recommended new federal programs to address the problems of poverty, unemployment, education, and housing and the expansion of existing urban programs, such as the Model Cities Program, to provide economic opportunity to residents of the inner city. Guidance was also offered to state and local officials for identifying potentially violent conditions, reducing the likelihood of violence, providing training to police to lessen tensions in minority communities, and organizing emergency operations in response to escalating violence. See also New York riots; Newark riot; Race riots of 1967; Race riots of the twentieth century; Watts riot

National Association for the Advancement of Colored People Identification: Oldest major civil rights organization in the United States Date: Founded in May, 1910 Since its founding in the early twentieth century, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People has been at the center of the struggle for civil rights and social, political, and economic equality for African Americans.

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The Niagara Movement, founded in 1905, was the forerunner to the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). A group of African American leaders headed by W. E. B. Du Bois and William Monroe Trotter met at Niagara Falls, Canada. Their chief purpose was to develop an aggressive campaign for the full citizenship of African Americans. They were dissatisfied with the approach of Booker T. Washington, who advocated black achievement while submitting to the injustice of segregation. Race riots, in which a number of African Americans were shot, beaten, burned, or hanged by lynch mobs in the early twentieth century, served as the backdrop for the meeting. Among the primary goals of the Niagara Movement were erasing all distinctions based on race, gaining respect for all working men, and attaining black suffrage. The Niagara Movement was the first attempt to organize African Americans after the Reconstruction Era (1863-1877). Open-minded whites, moved to action by the race riots, called for a national conference on Lincoln’s birthday in 1909 and invited Niagara Movement members. The NAACP was formally founded in May of 1910, and the Niagara Movement was incorporated into it. Most charter members were white rather than people of color. They had a wide range of expertise and resources. One of its most notable African American members was W. E. B. Du Bois, the great African American leader and scholar. The new organization vowed to fight de jure (legal) segregation and to work for equal education for white and black children, complete suffrage for African Americans, and the enforcement of the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments. During its first year, the NAACP established programs for African Americans in economic development and job opportunities. It pushed for more police protection in the South and for antilynching and lawlessness initiatives in the nation. The Crisis, the official publication of the NAACP, served as the “cutting edge” of critical thought regarding the “race question,” publicizing injustices against African Americans. Du Bois served as editor. Civil Rights or Economic Advancement? Early tension within the NAACP centered on the question of whether the budding organization should focus primarily on

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civil rights or should tackle economic issues as well. Noneconomic liberalism became the guiding light for the organization, since a consensus could not be reached over the importance of economic issues. The liberal white who served as president starting in 1930, Joel E. Spingarn, believed that once the racial issue in

Though associated mainly with African Americans, the NAACP has, since its inception, been an organization open to members of all racial and ethnic groups. (Library of Congress)

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the United States had been resolved, African Americans would be able to compete on an equal footing in the economic and educational arenas. Future leaders of the NAACP would include Walter White, Roy Wilkins, Benjamin Hooks, and Benjamin Chavis. There was considerable debate over whether African Americans should pursue a social agenda of equality and civil rights as opposed to economic development and independence. In its most acute form, this involved public debate between W. E. B. Du Bois and Booker T. Washington. Washington was renowned as the founder and president of Tuskegee Institute (later University) in Alabama. He was often consulted by presidents and invited to the White House. Washington argued that African Americans should focus on vocational education and training. He viewed politics as secondary and social equality for African Americans as less important—a philosophy that pleased white southerners and presidents. Civil rights, to his way of thinking, would gradually evolve as African Americans developed their own business enterprises. Until then, African Americans should not be too pushy, for fear of alienating whites. In short, African Americans should remain subservient to whites and, particularly in the South, reconcile with the prevalent racism. Du Bois, on the other hand, argued that Washington’s approach was inadequate and asked African Americans to give up too much. Du Bois believed that African Americans needed higher education. He held that a “talented tenth,” meaning those with higher education, would be in the position to lead the masses and working class. Unlike Washington, Du Bois maintained that economic progress was irrelevant without political participation and political power. To his way of thinking, political power would nurture economic development, not vice versa. The failure of noneconomic liberalism can be seen in the results of the Great Depression. While the NAACP focused on social status and targeted race and racism, African Americans were devastated by the Depression. Already on the bottom of the economic ladder, many African Americans began to migrate to

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northern industrial cities in search of job opportunities and an improved standard of living relative to that in the South. The timing of their migration, however, collided with the Great Depression. African Americans in the South still survived at a subsistence level, trying to make a living as sharecroppers in an agricultural economy. The arrival on the political stage of Marcus Garvey in the early 1920’s stirred the black masses. Preaching black nationalism and economic independence, Garvey urged African Americans to return to the Mother Country (Africa), emphasizing self-determination and independence. Garvey developed a large following in a short period of time between 1919 and 1925. Du Bois realized that the Garvey phenomenon, combined with the effects of the Depression of the 1930’s, revealed a critical flaw in the thinking and philosophy of the NAACP. In 1934 Du Bois challenged the NAACP to question its organizational philosophy of noneconomic liberalism and to stress economic development and issues. The organization, still with Spingarn and a board of directors dominated by whites, failed to heed the call. Their agenda remained centered on racial equality. It was at this point that Du Bois broke with the NAACP. Role in Justice and Equality A black and white team of lawyers of the NAACP, constituting its legal committee, won three significant legal cases during the first fifteen years of the NAACP’s existence. In Guinn v. United States (1915) the Supreme Court invalidated the grandfather clause in Maryland and Oklahoma, ruling that it was unconstitutional under the Fifteenth Amendment. Two years later, in the case of Buchanan v. Warley (1917), the Court voided a Louisville ordinance requiring African Americans to live in certain sections of the city. In the case of Moore v. Dempsey (1923), the Court ordered a new trial in a case in which an African American had been convicted of murder in Arkansas. The poverty-stricken defendant had been tried before an all-white jury. As a result of these early victories, the NAACP soon realized that the court system could be a valuable ally in the fight against racial injustice and the struggle for equality.

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In addition, the NAACP supported or provided the legal expertise in a number of cases that successfully challenged aspects of the “separate but equal” doctrine of racial segregation established in Plessy v. Ferguson (1896). This doctrine was premised on the notion that it was legal to have separate facilities for black and white people as long as those facilities were equal. Successful challenges included restrictive covenants in the case of Corrigan v. Buckley (1926) and the legality of the white primary in Nixon v. Herndon (1927) and Nixon v. Condon (1932). In the wake of Smith v. Allwright (1944), which finally sounded the death knell for the white primary, the NAACP began to organize local voter leagues in the South. Repression from local governments and the White Citizens’ Council, however, led to the decrease of the NAACP’s influence in the South in the 1950’s, to be replaced by younger organizations such as the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. The 1954 U.S. Supreme Court case of Brown v. Board of Education gained the greatest attention for the NAACP and its sister organization, the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund. Thurgood Marshall argued this landmark case. In its decision, the Court ruled that the pernicious “separate but equal” doctrine of racial segregation in the public schools was unconstitutional, stating that separate schools for whites and African Americans were inherently unequal. The Brown case served as the defining moment for the NAACP and the Civil Rights movement in the 1950’s. Legal Defense and Educational Fund The NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund (LDEF) was founded in 1939. It was designed to be the chief legal arm of the NAACP. It claimed to be a nonprofit entity, yet it had an interlocking membership with the NAACP. As a result of objections by the Internal Revenue Service in 1957, the legal and educational arm formally separated from the NAACP. Thus, the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund developed its own staff, board of directors, budget, and policies. Thurgood Marshall became the first director-counsel until 1961, followed by Jack Greenberg, who served in this capacity until 1984, when Julius L. Chambers took over. The LDEF had represented thousands of cases in edu-

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cation, employment, prisoners’ rights, housing, health care, voting rights, and other areas by the end of the 1980’s. The NAACP continued to push for civil rights and racial integration in the 1950’s and 1960’s as the Civil Rights movement intensified its efforts to overcome racial segregation in every phase of American society. Like other civil rights organizations of the time, the NAACP engaged in a number of nonviolent activities. The NAACP, along with a number of other organizations, was partly responsible for the Civil Rights Act of 1964. The NAACP, and the Civil Rights movement as a whole, reached its zenith in this decade, as the 1964 Civil Rights Act, the 1965 Voting Rights Act, and the 1968 Civil Rights Act were passed. In the 1970’s and 1980’s, the organization became increasingly irrelevant, since constitutional civil rights guarantees were in place and had been upheld by the courts. At the same time, the social movement in African American communities switched increasingly toward community control, black nationalism, and separatism, which were diametrically opposed to the organizational goals of the NAACP. In the 1980’s, as the federal government and the Reagan administration were less supportive of civil rights and previous black gains, the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund continued to play an important role in the legal arena. Mfanya D. Tryman Further Reading Two valuable additions to the literature on the NAACP are Freedom’s Sword: The NAACP and the Struggle Against Racism in America, 1909-1969 (Foreword by Julian Bond. New York: Routledge, 2005) by Gilbert Jonas and The NAACP (Philadelphia: Chelsea House, 2002) by Darren Rhym. Informative sources include Gerald David Jaynes and Robin M. Williams, Jr., eds., A Common Destiny: Blacks and American Society (Washington, D.C.: National Academy Press, 1989); Harold Cruse, Plural but Equal (New York: William Morrow, 1987); John Hope Franklin, From Slavery to Freedom (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1967); Jack Greenberg’s article “NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund,” in Civil Rights and Equality, edited by Leonard W. Levy, Kenneth L. Karst, and Dennis J. Mahoney (New York: Collier Macmillan,

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1989); and Talcott Parsons and Kenneth B. Clark, eds., The Negro American (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1966). Additional information on the NAACP will be found in Mimmi Finch, The NAACP: Its Fight for Justice (Metuchen, N.J.: Scarecrow Press, 1981); Charles Flint Kellogg, NAACP: A History of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1964); and Robert Zangrando, The NAACP Crusade Against Lynching, 1909-1950 (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1980). See also Atlanta Compromise; Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters; Brown v. Board of Education; Civil Rights Act of 1964; Civil Rights movement; Congress of Racial Equality; Education; Fair Employment Practices Committee; Freedom Summer; Green v. County School Board of New Kent County; Grovey v. Townsend; Guinn v. United States; Jews and African Americans; Jim Crow laws; Little Rock school desegregation crisis; Lynching; National Association for the Advancement of Colored People Legal Defense and Educational Fund; National Urban League; Niagara Movement; Nixon v. Condon; Nixon v. Herndon; School desegregation; Southern Christian Leadership Conference; Sweatt v. Painter; Talented Tenth; United States v. Classic; Universal Negro Improvement Association

National Association for the Advancement of Colored People Legal Defense and Educational Fund Identification: Legal arm of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People Date: Founded in 1939 The NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund has organized litigation campaigns on a variety of key equity issues, bringing suits on behalf of individuals and of major civil rights groups seeking to end legal discrimination against African Americans and other people of color.

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The NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund (sometimes abbreviated as LDF, sometimes as LDEF) was established in 19391940 as a tax-exempt corporation by the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. Its charter was handwritten in March, 1940, by Thurgood Marshall, who stated the new organization’s dual purpose: to provide legal aid to African Americans “suffering legal injustices by reason of race or color” and to create education opportunities for African Americans that had been denied them by reason of race or color. The LDF was founded to carry on litigation in the spirit of the social change agenda already established by the actions of NAACP attorneys in the American courts. It provides or supports legal representation on behalf of African Americans and other people of color in defending their legal and constitutional rights against discrimination in education, employment, land use, recreation, transportation, housing, voting, health care, and other areas. It has successfully argued against grandfather clauses, restrictive housing covenants in city ordinances, white primaries, white juries, capital punishment, and segregation of public facilities. Since the 1950’s the LDF has operated independently from its parent organization, which maintained its own legal department, and at times the relationship between the LDF and NAACP has involved some conflict. The LDF both represents individuals and brings suit on behalf of civil rights groups. Its clients have included the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), and local branches of the NAACP. It has been based in New York City since its formation and also maintains a center in Washington, D.C. Funding and Litigation Fund-raising for the Legal Defense and Educational Fund is conducted by the Committee of 100, a volunteer group. In the formative years of the 1940’s, the fund-raising drives of the committee were spearheaded by Harold Oram and Anna Caples Frank; during the Civil Rights movement, they were led by Allan Knight Chambers and Paul Moore. The LDF is supported by thousands

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of individual donations and by sustaining grants from smaller foundations, notably the Field Foundation. The largest contributions to the LDF come from major foundations, including the Ford, Carnegie, and Rockefeller foundations, and from corporations. The LDF has litigated many hundreds of court cases on the state level and has argued many of the key civil rights cases heard before the U.S. Supreme Court since World War II. While always pursuing cases on a variety of fronts—including, in the 1940’s, victories in white primary cases, which ended the exclusion of African Americans from the Democratic Party in the South (Smith v. Allwright, 1944), and the restrictive covenant cases, which held unconstitutional covenants prohibiting the sale of property to people of color—the initial focus of the LDF was the desegregation of American schools. Its landmark case was Brown v. Board of Education (1954), argued before the U.S. Supreme Court by the LDF team of Thurgood Marshall, Jack Greenberg, Louis Redding, George E. C. Hayes, Howard Jenkins, James M. Nabrit, Jr., and Spotswood W. Robinson III. In Brown the Court, under Chief Justice Earl Warren, ruled in a unanimous decision that racial segregation of public schools was inherently unequal. At its inception the LDF had begun challenging the legal precedent of the “separate but equal” doctrine established in regard to transportation by the U.S. Supreme Court in Plessy v. Ferguson (1896) and extended through other cases to educational institutions. In a series of cases argued by Marshall and LDF staff, the LDF chipped away at the strength of the separate but equal doctrine. Beginning with higher education, the LDF initiated suits in several different states and won favorable rulings from the U.S. Supreme Court that opened professional and graduate schools to African American applicants. One of the key cases in this effort was Sweatt v. Painter (1950), in which the Court found against the University of Texas Law School, which had been refusing admission to African Americans, on the grounds that a separate black law school did not meet the criteria for equal professional education. Brown v. Board of Education broadened the issue of equal access to education to the more comprehensive level of elementary

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and secondary schools. In their ruling, the Supreme Court justices found that the black children represented by the LDF had been denied equal protection under the laws as guaranteed by the Fourteenth Amendment, thus—at long last—reversing the separate but equal mandate of Plessy v. Ferguson. After Brown In the years following Brown, the LDF initiated hundreds of civil rights demonstration cases in support of the public actions taken by organizers and activists of the Civil Rights movement. These included the defense of Martin Luther King, Jr., Ralph Abernathy, and other SCLC activists in their criminal contempt case arising from their defiance of a court injunction prohibiting marches during the 1963 Birmingham demonstrations (Walker v. City of Birmingham, 1967). In Walker, the U.S. Supreme Court ultimately upheld the ruling of the Alabama Supreme Court, diminishing the constitutional protection afforded protestors under the Bill of Rights. The 1957 “Little Rock Nine” action in Arkansas was one of the LDF’s key school desegregation cases. In the Little Rock case, members of the local NAACP aided nine black high school students who challenged the school district and the state to admit them into a previously all-white high school. Their admittance was eventually secured under federal military guard. Another major LDF desegregation case was that of James Meredith. In that suit the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Judicial Circuit in New Orleans ordered the University of Mississippi to admit its first African American student (Meredith v. Fair, 1962). The Meredith case was argued by Constance Baker Motley, who had been one of the central figures on the LDF staff since the 1940’s. LDF lawyers also defended the organizers of sit-ins, participants in the Freedom Rides, and those who spearheaded other public protests. Their court victories, combined with the public activism of the Civil Rights movement, led to passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965. An LDF case, for example, created the doctrinal base for Title IV of the 1964 act, which made federal funding of institutions that discriminate against members of minorities illegal.

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In addition to desegregation, voting, residential discrimination, and other civil rights causes, the LDF has devoted campaigns since the late 1960’s and early 1970’s to overturning the death penalty and initiating prison reform. In response to the women’s movement, the LDF established a program in the 1970’s to promote educational and employment opportunities for black women. Key victories came in 1972, when LDF attorneys succeeded in separate cases in getting the U.S. Supreme Court to rule that the death penalty was unconstitutional as then administered and that towns with primarily white residents could not withdraw from school systems in which the student population was predominantly African American. In the post-Civil Rights movement era, the LDF expanded into poverty law and began taking the cases of Mexican Americans, Native Americans, gays and lesbians, women, and others bringing suits on discrimination grounds. Educational Work In addition to bringing litigation, the LDF lobbies for equal rights legislation and monitors federal programs for compliance with civil rights aims. LDF staff members give advice to lawyers involved in rights cases and supply information on current legal trends and decisions affecting the status of people of color. Funds are also allocated to provide counsel and to train attorneys to do activist work. Since the late 1970’s, the Herbert Lehman Education Fund, an LDF scholarship program established in 1965, has awarded African American students some two hundred scholarships per year to offset the costs of state college tuition. In 1962 the LDF began providing internships to recent law school graduates to work in the LDF offices and then to go into the field and work in integrated firms in areas of the South where there were few African American attorneys. Marian Wright Edelman (founder of the Children’s Defense Fund) and Julius Chambers (later a president of the LDF, and director-counsel of the organization beginning in 1984) were among the early interns. The internship process was formalized in 1971 with the creation of the Earl Warren Legal Training Program, funded with grants from the Carnegie and Rockefeller foundations. Over time, as increas-

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ing numbers of African Americans began working in legal practices in the South, the internship aspect of the program was abandoned, but the Earl Warren Legal Training Program continues to grant fellowships to black students attending formerly all-white law schools in the South and to give financial assistance to lawyer training. Other Programs The LDF supplies community assistance through its Division of Legal Information and Community Services. The LDF also sponsors several publications, including its Annual Report, the Equal Justice quarterly, and numerous legal materials, brochures, and pamphlets. It also issues press releases on current legal and political events and prepares watchdog reports. It hosts an annual institute to encourage public awareness of current problems faced by people of color. Headquarters and Leadership Thurgood Marshall headed the LDF for more than two decades, from its inception in 1939 until 1961. Jack Greenberg, who had been an LDF staff member since the 1940’s, succeeded Marshall as LDF director-counsel when Marshall was appointed by President John F. Kennedy to the U.S. Court of Appeals. Like Marshall, Greenberg had a long tenure as head of the LDF. He resigned in 1984 to accept a position as a professor at the Columbia University School of Law. Greenberg, who is white, was the subject of a 1983 boycott by African American students at Harvard University who believed that the legal rights organization should be headed by a person of color. Julius Chambers succeeded Greenberg as head of the LDF. During the early 1980’s, the LDF moved from its old location at 10 Columbus Circle to new offices at 99 Hudson Street in the Tribeca area of New York, joining with the Puerto Rican Legal Defense and Education Fund, the Asian American Legal Defense and Education Fund, the NOW Legal Defense and Education Fund, and the Council of New York Law Associates to constitute the Public Interest Law Center. Elaine Jones (the first black woman graduate of the University of Virginia Law School), who, as part of her long career with the LDF,

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had worked closely with LDF staff lawyer Lani Guinier on voting rights issues in the 1970’s, became the director of the LDF office in Washington, D.C., in 1977. She became the director-counsel of the LDF in 1993. Barbara Bair Further Reading The LDF is put in a larger context in Derrick A. Bell, Jr., Race, Racism, and American Law (2d ed. Boston: Little, Brown, 1980). Jack Greenberg wrote of his years with the LDF, his fellow staff members, and the cases they fought over four decades in Crusaders in the Courts: How a Dedicated Band of Lawyers Fought for the Civil Rights Revolution (New York: Basic Books, 1994). See also Richard Kluger’s history of the LDF’s most famous case, Simple Justice: The History of “Brown v. Board of Education” and Black America’s Struggle for Equality (New York: Vintage Books, 1977); the LDF’s own account of its history, National Association for the Advancement of Colored People Legal Defense and Educational Fund, Thirty Years of Building American Justice (New York: Author, 1970); and Mark V. Tushnet’s history of NAACP legal efforts that preceded the founding of the LDF, The NAACP’s Legal Strategy Against Segregated Education, 1925-1950 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1987). Tushnet also wrote a study of the legal career of Thurgood Marshall, Making Civil Rights Law: Thurgood Marshall and the Supreme Court, 1936-1961 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994). Finally, Stephen L. Wasby, Anthony A. D’Amato, and Rosemary Metrailer, Desegregation from Brown to Alexander: An Exploration of Supreme Court Strategies (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1977), deals with many LDF cases. See also Brown v. Board of Education; Civil Rights Act of 1964; Civil Rights movement; Little Rock school desegregation crisis; Marshall’s appointment to the Supreme Court; National Association for the Advancement of Colored People; Voting Rights Act of 1965

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National Association for the Advancement of Colored People v. Alabama The Case: U.S. Supreme Court ruling on freedom of association Date: June 30, 1958 The U.S. Supreme Court explicitly recognized that freedom of association was implied in the First Amendment’s guarantee of free expression and free assembly and was an “inseparable aspect” of the liberty guaranteed by the Fourteenth Amendment. The case originated when the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) appealed a contempt order after the association refused to provide the state of Alabama with a state-law-mandated list of NAACP members. The U.S. Supreme Court ruled that requiring disclosure of membership in an advocacy organization would effectively deny the constitutional rights of the members to free speech. The Court held that there was a “close nexus” between the freedoms of speech and assembly. It also noted that revealing membership in a controversial organization had resulted in economic and social reprisals so hostile as to effectively interfere with the rights to free speech and assembly. This Court decision was the first to link a right to privacy to the right to free association. The Court held for the first time that a constitutional right to associate freely with others was a basic liberty guaranteed under the due process clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. Lisa M. Sardinia Further Reading Fellman, David. The Constitutional Right of Association. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1963. Brief but rather dense discussion of the small number of cases concerning the First Amendment right to assembly. Perry, Michael J. We the People: The Fourteenth Amendment and the Supreme Court. New York: Oxford University Press, 1999. De-

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tails the Court’s history of rulings regarding the Fourteenth Amendment. Woods, Jeff. “Designed to Harass: The Act Ten Controversy in Arkansas.” Arkansas Historical Quarterly 56, no. 4 (1997): 443-460. Examination of state law requiring state employees to list all organizational affiliations in the aftermath of NAACP v. Alabama. See also Montgomery bus boycott; National Association for the Advancement of Colored People

National Association of Colored Women Identification: Women’s organization founded to improve the lives of African American people in the United States and to help them achieve full citizenship rights Date: Founded in July, 1896 Place: Washington, D.C. The National Association of Colored Women became an umbrella group for African American women’s organizations at both state and local levels. Near the end of the eighteenth century, grave concerns about African Americans being treated as second-class citizens compelled a group of African American women to move beyond their local and state associations to devise plans for the formation of a national body that would systematically and professionally address the problems that they believed threatened the very survival of African Americans. Economic disparities, political disfranchisement, and social ostracism presented the greatest threats to African American aspirations for freedom and inclusion in the American system of democracy. Meeting at the Nineteenth Street Baptist Church in Washington, D.C., in July, 1896, the National Federation of Afro-American Women and the National League of Colored Women joined forces to form a national organization known as the National Association of Colored Women (NACW).

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Operating through a series of departments and a strong executive cabinet, the NACW became an umbrella group for African American women’s organizations at both state and local levels. The organization’s official publication, National Notes, served as an instrument to unite the women and to educate them in the concepts and techniques of reform, advocating racial uplift, improved race relations, and protection of women. From its inception, the NACW has worked to improve the lives of African American people in the United States and to help them achieve full citizenship rights. Alvin K. Benson See also Colored Women’s League; Combahee River Collective; Million Woman March; National Black Women’s Political Leadership Caucus; National Council of Negro Women

National Black Women’s Political Leadership Caucus Identification: Organization that encourages African American women and youth to participate in the country’s economic and political systems Date: Founded in 1971 This organization is dedicated to helping African American women work toward equality and increase their knowledge of the role of women in the political process. Founded in 1971, the National Black Women’s Leadership Political Caucus is committed to helping African American women work toward equality and increase their knowledge of the role of women in the political process. The organization has its headquarters in Washington, D.C., but it also has groups in three regions and thirty-three states throughout the United States. Aside from its primary members, the caucus has an auxiliary membership that includes men, senior citizens, and youth. The organization encourages African American women and youth to partici-

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pate in the country’s economic and political systems. In addition, the caucus enables women to familiarize themselves with the functions of city, state, and federal government. The group is also involved in research, conducting studies in the areas of African American families, politics, and economics. A variety of other services are provided by the National Black Women’s Political Leadership Caucus, such as training in public speaking; legislative federal, state, and local workshops; children’s services; charitable programs; awards for humanitarianism; and placement services. The organization publishes a semiannual newsletter and has published election tabloids. K. Sue Jewell See also Colored Women’s League; Combahee River Collective; Million Woman March; National Association of Colored Women; National Council of Negro Women

National Coalition of Blacks for Reparations in America Identification: Federation of organizations across the United States that support reparations for African Americans Date: Founded in 1987 This coalition seeks a formal apology by the government and supports a congressional bill that demands reparations for African Americans. The National Coalition of Blacks for Reparations in America (N’COBRA) is a coalition of organizations across the United States that support reparations for African Americans. African Americans were supposed to receive “forty acres and a mule” from the U.S. government upon emancipation in reparation for the time they spent in slavery, but this proposal was never actually made law. The newly freed blacks lacked property, capital, education, and job experience, giving them a severely disadvantaged start. In addition, not long after slavery was made illegal, a system of segregation known as Jim Crow took effect. Segre-

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gation blocked equal access to home ownership, which is the main source of capital for most Americans, and this governmentsanctioned inequality can be seen as the root cause of the wealth gap between black and white Americans in modern times. N’COBRA supports and lobbies for HR 40, a congressional bill introduced every year since 1989 by John Conyers, a Democratic representative from Illinois, that demands reparations for African Americans not unlike those received by Native Americans for land seized by the government and by Japanese Americans for time spent in internment camps during World War II. While the organization does not specify the exact amount of reparation money that should be paid, its Web site suggested, in 2005, a figure of eight trillion dollars. Eileen O’Brien Further Reading Horowitz, David. Uncivil Wars: The Controversy over Reparations for Slavery. San Francisco: Encounter Books, 2002. Robinson, Randall. The Debt: What America Owes to Blacks. New York: Dutton, 2000. Winbush, Raymond A., ed. Should America Pay? Slavery and the Raging Debate on Reparations. New York: Amistad, 2003. See also Emancipation Proclamation; Republic of New Africa; Slavery; Slavery and race relations

National Council of Colored People Identification: Abolitionist organization Date: Founded on July 6, 1853 Place: Rochester, New York The National Council of Colored People was one of the first groups concerned with the advancement of African Americans and the cause of abolition. In July, 1853, more than one hundred delegates from around the United States assembled in Rochester, New York, for a three-day

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convention to form the National Council of Colored People. This organization was an outgrowth of the Negro Convention movement, which had begun during a meeting on September 20-24, 1830, in Philadelphia. Richard Allen formed the convention with the intention of improving the lives of African Americans by raising their social status through education and, possibly, emigration. The convention met many times in many cities, discussing plans for improvement, and the group thrived on the increasing solidarity among its members. It was at one of the convention meetings, in Rochester, New York, that the plan for the National Council of Colored People was adopted. The meeting in Rochester drew many prominent African American leaders, including Frederick Douglass, James McCune Smith, and James Pennington. Formation of the Council At the meeting in 1853, a constitution was drawn up for the new organization, and a president and several vice presidents were chosen. The group discussed the rampant racial oppression of the African American people. Members of both the convention and the newly formed National Council of Colored People believed that, in order to increase the rate of improvement of the social status of African Americans, it was necessary to create a new institution for the education of African American youth. The new institution would be an industrial school that concentrated on agriculture and the mechanical arts. On the second day of the convention, the council elected to withdraw the proposed school plan because of the exclusive nature of the school. In the final hours of the last day of the convention, the council endorsed two seminaries as places for the education of African Americans— McGrawville College and Allegheny City College. On November 15, 1853, elections were held in several cities to elect delegates for the formation of new state councils that would act in accordance with the National Council of Colored People. The leading delegates would attend the national council meetings as well as their own state council meetings. The first meeting of the National Council of Colored People was held November 23, 1853, in New York. At least one council member each from the states of New York, Connecticut, Rhode Island, and Ohio was missing, but

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because of the great distance the other council members had traveled, the meeting continued. After proceeding with the meeting, one delegate from Ohio appeared and demanded that all prior proceedings be nullified. This caused great distress among the council members and created a somewhat hostile working environment, which contributed to the short life of the council. Despite the bleak beginnings of the national council, the state councils operated much more smoothly and with enthusiasm. Disagreements Continue In both the national and state councils, the idea of an African American school was revisited. Frederick Douglass defended the school plan unsuccessfully for two years. The country was experiencing an economic depression, which made it hard to fund the school. There also was still concern over the exclusive nature of an African American school. The idea of a separate African American school brought many emotions to the forefront. Integrationists were wary of accepting such a school plan because of the isolation of the school and its students, yet even they saw benefits in an all African American school. Emigrationists considered the proposal and were much more willing to begin work on construction. Amid much opposition, in October, 1855, the convention elected to discontinue plans for the proposed school. The other committees set up by the first national convention and their ambitious plans to assist African Americans in business pursuits and the creation of a library and museum seemed to have stopped on paper. The second meeting of the National Council of Colored People was scheduled for May 24, 1854, in Cleveland, but it was postponed in order to accommodate more delegates. Eventually, only a few delegates were able to attend. Among the members attending, a debate developed over the recognition of Ohio at the national level, creating a deadlock. A suggestion was made to dissolve the organization, but after a close vote, the National Council of Colored People continued to operate. Ohio, however, withdrew its participation. At the meeting of May 8, 1855, nearly all the delegates were from New York, as most others had declined to participate. The issue of an African American school again was discussed and

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once again defeated. Another issue was discussed for the first time—emigration to Canada. Although most delegates at the convention were willing to remain in the United States, they expressed trepidation on the matter of the United States Constitution and the issue of slavery. The issue of emigration was the last to be discussed before the close of the final meeting of the National Council of Colored People. The state councils continued to operate and pursue social equality for African Americans for a few years longer, with councils in some states surviving longer than others. Jeri Kurtzleben Further Reading Howard Holman Bell’s A Survey of the Negro Convention Movement, 1830-1861 (New York: Arno Press, 1969) contains substantial information on the Negro Convention Movement, from which the National Council of Colored People was formed. John W. Blassingame and John R. McKivigan edited the multivolume Frederick Douglass Papers (Series 1, Speeches, Debates, and Interviews. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1991): Volume 2, 1847-1854, includes several references to the industrial college proposed at the 1853 meeting in Rochester, New York; volume 3, 1855-1863, includes an interview with President Andrew Johnson, in which the intent of the National Convention is discussed; and volume 4, 1864-1880, contains a speech and several pages of notes from the National Council meeting in May, 1855. Alton Hornsby, Jr., in Chronology of African-American History (Detroit, Mich.: Gale Research, 1991), places the National Council of Colored People in the context of relevant information on its foundation. Harry A. Ploski and James Williams are the editors of The Negro Almanac: A Reference Work on the African American (Detroit, Mich.: Gale Research, 1989), a beginning source of information on the Negro Convention movement. See also Abolition; African Methodist Episcopal Church; American Anti-Slavery Society; Ashmun Institute; Free African Society; Liberator, The; Negro Conventions; Pennsylvania Society for the Abolition of Slavery; Underground Railroad

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National Council of Negro Women Identification: Organization that seeks to promote cooperation among women Date: Founded in 1935 Since its founding, the National Council of Negro Women organization has advocated women’s issues nationally and internationally. The National Council of Negro Women (NCNW) seeks to facilitate cooperation among women and act as an advocate for women’s issues nationally and internationally. Founded in 1935 by Mary McLeod Bethune, an educator and presidential adviser,the organization encompasses a coalition of thirty-one national organizations. It has local chapters throughout the United States, the Women’s Center for Education and Career Advancement in New York City, and offices in western and southern Africa. The NCNW maintains a clearinghouse in which information that will improve the socioeconomic status of African American women and other women of color is compiled and disseminated.

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The organization also publishes Black Woman’s Voice, a periodical, and Sister’s Magazine, a quarterly. In addition, the council is responsible for an archive for black women’s history and the Bethune Museum. One of the primary goals of the council is to assist women in developing leadership skills to be used on community, national, and international levels. One of its international projects is to improve social and economic conditions for rural women in developing countries. K. Sue Jewell See also Colored Women’s League; Combahee River Collective; National Association of Colored Women; National Black Women’s Political Leadership Caucus

National Urban League Identification: Civil rights organization that was founded to address the special problems of urban African Americans Date: Founded on September 29, 1910; reorganized in 1911 Place: New York, New York The National Urban League organization has played many roles over the years, including serving black workers in northern cities, aiding the rural and urban poor in all regions of the country, and participating in political action. The National Urban League was founded in 1910 as the National League on Urban Conditions Among Negroes, an organization that helped black migrants coming from the rural South to find work and make transitions to living in northern cities. The league merged in 1911 with the Association for the Protection of Colored Women and the Committee for Improving the Industrial Conditions of Negroes in New York, both groups founded in 1906 to aid urban migrants. After these mergers, the organization adopted its shorter title, the National Urban League. The emphasis of the National Urban League has shifted over the years from serving black workers in northern cities to assisting the rural and urban poor in all regions of the country, and

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Lester B. Granger, executive director of the National Urban League from 1941 to 1961. (Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture)

from an educational, service, and investigational association to one involved in political action. A nonmembership organization, it has a centralized structure, with a main headquarters in New York and local units in major cities; the local units have their own boards and budgets and adapt national policies to local needs. The league maintains regional bureaus in Washington, D.C.; Akron, Ohio; St. Louis, Missouri; and Atlanta, Georgia. The national governing board is, according to organization bylaws, interracial, and 25 percent of its members are under the age of thirty. From 1923 until 1948 the National Urban League published the influential magazine Opportunity, which, along with the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People’s The Crisis, also based in New York, was a voice for black intellectuals, writers, and social reformers. From 1910 through the 1930’s Depression, the league focused on services to those seeking jobs and housing, and lobbied to end discrimination in federal policies and the labor movement. The league grew in size and influence during World War II, when many thousands of African Americans moved to northern industrial cities to do war-related work. The organization was conservative in its approach until the 1960’s, when the severity of the problems of segregated housing,

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ghetto conditions, and inferior education called for more activist policies. Leadership The league emerged as a major advocate for civil rights under the leadership of Whitney M. Young, Jr., who became its executive director in 1961. Under the influence of the Civil Rights and Black Power movements, Young and the National Urban League pursued active protest politics, including a sponsorship role in the 1963 March on Washington. After Young died in 1971, he was succeeded as president of the National Urban League by Vernon E. Jordan, Jr. John Jacob followed in 1982. Jordan and Jacob established several communitybased improvement programs. These include street academies to aid high school dropouts in finishing school; job training and placement services in computer skills, law enforcement, and the construction industry; voter registration drives; a Business Development Program for black businesspersons; and a National Consumer Health Education Program to supply health workers to local neighborhoods. Hugh Price succeeded Jacob as president in 1994 and continued in that position into the first years of the twenty-first century. Under his leadership, the league focused its work on problems arising from welfare reform, cutbacks in affirmative action programs, and ongoing racial discrimination in employment. Barbara Bair See also Civil Rights movement; Great Migration; National Association for the Advancement of Colored People

Native Americans and African Americans Traditional American racial history, by focusing on American Indianwhite or black-white relations, has ignored the important cultural contributions of interactions among Native Americans and African Americans.

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Since the 1960’s, revisionist historians have shown great interest in the histories of American Indians and African Americans. The study of the history of the contact between these two groups has been a logical development, and much new evidence has emerged. For example, significant contact between American Indians and Africans occurred in Europe at the time of Portuguese encounters with Africans. In the sixteenth century, American Indians were traded for West African slaves, who were needed to work on Brazilian plantations. Early Explorers and the Colonial Era The Spanish first made major use of African slaves in the New World. An initial function of Africans, because of their knowledge of Indian culture, was to aid in exploration as guides and interpreters. The first African in the New World known by name was Estevanico Dorantes, a Muslim from North Africa. He accompanied the expedition of Pánfilo de Narváez, which was shipwrecked off the coast of Florida in 1529. Francisco Vásquez de Coronado was also accompanied by Africans as he explored central Kansas in 1541. Indigenous forms of servitude were modified by the Spanish to serve the labor needs of their mines and plantations. Beginning with Hernando de Soto in 1538, the Spanish transported thousands of Indians from the Southeast to the West Indies. By 1540, however, Indian slavery was deemed unsuitable because of the Indians’ susceptibility to disease; thereafter African labor began to be used. The mixing of Native American and African slave populations in sixteenth century Spanish America created a solidarity between the two groups, as seen in numerous revolts and insurrections. Contacts among the races in the age of exploration were minor compared with those that occurred in the period of colonization. The main areas of interaction can be divided geographically into, first, New England, the Middle Colonies, and the Chesapeake, and second, the Southeast and Indian Territory. Except for the case of the Seminole Wars in Spanish Florida, the relations between African Americans and Indians were not as amicable in English North America as they were in Spanish America. This

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Home of an African American family living among the Creek Indians in Oklahoma at the end of the nineteenth century. (National Archives)

was attributable in large part to demographics. The numbers of Indian and African slaves in the area from New England to the Chesapeake were small in the early seventeenth century. Over time the Indian population diminished, and the black population increased. Although the two groups were initially few in number and spread over a large geographical area, there was extensive intermingling, which served to modify the physical appearance of both in Massachusetts, Connecticut, New York, New Jersey, Delaware, Maryland, and Virginia. The main form of relationship during this time was intermarriage between free blacks and reservation Indians. Reservations, in fact, were centers of racial fusion all the way from Cape Cod to the Chesapeake. Crispus Attucks, Paul Cuffe, and Frederick Douglass were among the famous men of mixed African and Native American heritage. A mulatto named York, the first black to cross the continent, was critical to the success of the Lewis and Clark expedition of 1804-1806. The explorers would have turned back at the Rocky Mountains had not York befriended the Shoshone, who provided needed supplies and horses. The son of slaves, York was known

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as “Big Medicine” by the Indians. He spoke several Indian languages as well as French. The Indian guide Sacagawea was his constant companion during the expedition. Indian Slave Owners The most massive contact between Indians and African Americans arose within the system of slavery developed by the socalled Five Civilized Tribes of the Southeast—the Cherokee, Chickasaw, Choctaw, Creek, and Seminole. Predominant among the Five Tribes were the Cherokee, whose 12,395-member nation held 583 slaves in 1809. By 1824, the numbers had grown to 15,560 and 1,277 respectively. Although it seems that the Cherokee were not unduly harsh masters, they refused to allow intermixture with blacks. The Chickasaw and Choctaw tribes together counted 25,000 members, with 5,000 slaves. Believing, like the Cherokee, in racial separation, these two tribes were harsh masters. The Chickasaw, who on occasion murdered the slaves of other owners, were especially harsh. The Creek and Seminole were considered the least “civilized” of the Five Tribes, partly because they had the least prejudice toward African Americans. This was especially true of the Seminole, who allowed their “slaves” to live in separate farming communities while paying a small annual tribute. The Creek, a patriarchal society, had children by slave women. The Creek reared these children as equals to their full-blooded progeny. A famous Creek chief, Tustennuggee Emartha, or Jim Boy, was of such mixed ancestry. The Seminole, who numbered about 3,900 in 1822, owned 800 slaves. These slaves were “maroons”—they had escaped the plantations of Georgia and the Carolinas. It was the presence of the maroons that initiated the Florida Wars. War and Politics Native American and African American military cooperation occurred in two campaigns closely related in time, geography, and cause. The second decade of the nineteenth century saw, in the Southeast, the outbreak of the Creek War and the First Seminole War. Both were precipitated by the anger of white slave owners who sought the return of their runaways from neighboring

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reservations. Andrew Jackson led the assault that crushed the Creek Red Stick Revolt in 1814, and he ended the First Seminole War in 1818 by capturing a Seminole stronghold in Florida. African Americans figured prominently in both of these wars, since they had the most to lose in the event of a defeat. In numerous battles, Indians and African Americans fought and died together. Jim Bowlegs, who was a slave of Chief Billy Bowlegs and served as his interpreter and adviser, later became a Seminole maroon leader, organizing a resettlement for his group in Mexico in 1850. The Indians and African Americans continued to fight for their independence in two successive wars until the Civil War broke out. The participation of slave-holding Indians in the Civil War (1861-1865) was determined by their respective views on slavery. The Chickasaw and Choctaw tribes, who were the most prejudiced against African Americans, supported the Confederacy; the Creek and Seminole opposed it. The Cherokee held a divided position; mixed-bloods (part Indian, part white) generally supported the South, while full-bloods tended to sympathize with the North. In the confusion of war, the slaves were left largely on their own, attacking both Unionists and Confederates. After the war some African Americans sought incorporation into the various tribes. This action was resisted by the Choctaw and Chickasaw. After the tribes’ removal to Indian Territory, the legacy of Indian slave-holding was clearly evident. By 1907, no Seminole family was free of black intermixing, and almost no Creek families were pure-blooded. The other three tribes, however, had practically no mixture. Since the 1960’s a new alliance has developed between Native Americans and African Americans in the arena of political activity. The Black Power and Civil Rights movements inspired Red Power organizations such as the American Indian Movement (AIM). Black theology has been the model for the development of what has been called “red theology.” Such political actions have spread to international bodies such as the United Nations and the Organization of Indigenous Peoples, in which African and indigenous New World peoples sustain positive contact. William H. Green

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Further Reading Jack D. Forbes’s Black Africans and Native Americans: Color, Race, and Caste in the Evolution of Red-Black Peoples (New York: Basil Blackwell, 1988) uses ethnohistorical and philological methods to break new ground in the study of American culture by stressing Native American contributions to the ethnic complexity of the nation. Gary B. Nash’s Red, White, and Black: The Peoples of Early America (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1974) argues that American culture arose as the product of three centuries of intense mixing and contact between three cultures: red, black, and white. Dwight W. Hoover’s The Red and the Black (Chicago: Rand McNally, 1976) presents a detailed history of Indian-black interaction from the fifteenth century, with special attention to the distinct development of each culture. William Loren Katz’s Black Indians: A Hidden Heritage (New York: Atheneum, 1986) examines how European Americans sought to discourage contacts between Indians and blacks from the age of exploration to Reconstruction. R. Halliburton, Jr.’s Red over Black: Black Slavery Among the Cherokee Indians (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1977) and Theda Perdue’s Slavery and the Evolution of Cherokee Society, 1540-1886 (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1979) look at slavery within the Cherokee Nation. Daniel F. Littlefield, Jr., examines the rise and development of Creek slavery from its beginnings to the aftermath of the Red Stick Rebellion in Africans and Creeks: From the Colonial Period to the Civil War (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1979) and shows the influence of African slaves on the Seminoles’ activities as they fought and signed treaties with the federal government from the time of the removal policy to the Civil War in Africans and Seminoles: From Removal to Emancipation (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1978). Kevin Mulroy’s Freedom on the Border: The Seminole Maroons in Florida, the Indian Territory, Coahuila, and Texas (Lubbock: Texas Tech University Press, 1993) describes the long interaction between black Seminoles and their native masters as both sought to cooperate and survive destructive federal policies. See also Civil War; Slavery

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Negro Conventions The Events: Series of national gatherings to discuss economic, social, and political issues of concern to African Americans Date: 1817-1880’s The six national Negro Conventions held during the early 1830’s addressed a variety of issues, including the organization of economic boycotts and mass protests. The conventions exerted a considerable influence upon local black communities. Mass conventions were a popular means of protest among African Americans during the nineteenth century. Rooted in constitutional principles of free assembly and petition, these conventions were a product of the group consciousness that emerged among free blacks in northern urban areas following the American Revolution and were a reaction to a burgeoning institutional racism that legitimized slavery and stripped free African Americans of basic civil rights during the postrevolutionary period. The first great national Negro convention, held at Philadelphia in August, 1817, produced resolutions opposing slavery and denouncing a plan proposed by the U.S. Congress to colonize black Americans in Africa. Although largely symbolic, the convention of 1817 inspired the Negro Convention movement of the 1830’s, which was to provide a forum for expressions of militancy and nationalism among the growing population of free northern blacks. The Negro Convention movement of the 1830’s was aided by the emergence of black leaders with national status and varied agendas. Although dominated by antislavery societies, the six national Negro Conventions held between 1830 and 1835 addressed a variety of issues, including the organization of economic boycotts and mass protests, the observance of national days of prayer and fasting, and the establishment of temperance societies and African missionary groups. The conventions exerted a considerable influence upon local black communities, chiefly through the encouragement of verbal agitation; yet the movement was cut short in mid-decade by white abolitionists who, fearing that the black separatism often advocated by con-

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vention delegates would damage the antislavery movement, infiltrated the conventions and split their leadership. Revival of the Movement The Negro Convention movement was briefly revived in the early 1840’s, when young black militants in New York and Philadelphia called a convention of black leaders to protest slavery and racial inequality. However, this convention, which failed by one vote to endorse slave insurrection, proved a militant exception to a new spirit of gradualism among black abolitionists. The last notable antebellum Negro Convention, held in Cleveland, Ohio, in 1854, yielded compromise proposals for the repatriation of African Americans that early conventions had so vehemently opposed. The end of the Civil War and the beginning of Reconstruction sparked a revival of Negro Conventions in the 1870’s and 1880’s, as southern freedmen and northern agitators sought vehicles to petition the government for civil rights and protection from mob violence. These conventions were chiefly local and regional in nature, designed to facilitate political organization and to appeal directly to legislators and state governors. Nevertheless, na-

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tional conventions continued, the most notable being the National Colored Convention held in Louisville, Kentucky, in 1883, in which the delegates called for an end to economic peonage in the South, equal rights and suffrage for African Americans, and integration of schools and the military. The convention movement died out in the 1890’s as Jim Crow laws and mob violence swept the South and accommodationism replaced agitation and protest as a political strategy for black leaders. However, the tradition of assembly and militancy brought about by the convention movement survived in the black conferences of the early twentieth century (for example, the Niagara conference of 1909, which spawned the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People), in the mass protest marches of the Civil Rights movement during the 1960’s, and in the Million Man and Million Woman Marches of the 1990’s. Michael H. Burchett See also Abolition; Civil War; Jim Crow laws; National Council of Colored People; Niagara Movement; Reconstruction

New York City slave revolt The Event: Abortive uprising of the city’s slave community Date: 1712 Place: New York, New York Although New York’s slave revolt was abortive, it shaped the future of the institution of slavery in New York. The New York City Slave Revolt of 1712 calls attention to the fact that slavery had become more firmly established in colonial New York than in any other British province north of Chesapeake Bay. Slaves were already an integral part of the labor force when England conquered Dutch New Netherland in 1664. As European immigration lagged, slave labor became increasingly important. Between 1703 and 1723, New York’s total population almost doubled, increasing from 20,540 to 40,564, but its black population

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(slaves and free blacks were always lumped together and listed in the census as “Negroes”) almost tripled, jumping from 2,253 to 6,171. Background As the number of bondsmen increased, so did the anxiety level of white New Yorkers. In 1708, following the grisly murder of a Long Island planter and his family, four slaves were tried, convicted, and executed “with all the torment possible for a terror to others.” Shortly thereafter, the provincial assembly passed An Act for Preventing the Conspiracy of Slaves, which defined the judicial proceedings and made death the penalty for any slave found guilty of murder or attempted murder. Fear of slave conspiracy led whites to look with ambivalence upon Anglican catechist Elias Neau’s teaching among New York City African Americans and Native Americans. Small-scale slave owning prevailed in New York. Few white families owned more than a slave or two, so slave husbands, wives, and children might be scattered among several households. Regulations restricting their freedom of movement were bitterly resented by slaves, because they interfered with their domestic life. Such restrictions often were more apparent than real, because slavery in New York City and surrounding villages, where slaves were most heavily concentrated, was tied to a developing urban economy that demanded a flexible, if not free, labor supply. Slaves in New York City and Albany often hired themselves out, splitting the pay with their respective owners, but otherwise lived separately from their masters. The hustle and bustle of the urban economic scene afforded slaves considerable opportunity to meet, socialize, and discuss common grievances, despite the best efforts of whites to keep them under surveillance. The slave uprising of 1712 apparently began as a conspiracy on March 25. The ringleaders reportedly were of the Cormantine and Pawpaw peoples, Africans who had not been long in New York; a few Spanish Indian slaves; and at least one free black, a practitioner of African medicine and magic who reportedly supplied special powder to protect the rebels from the white

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man’s weapons. Their motivation, according to both Governor Robert Hunter and Chaplain John Sharpe, was revenge for ill treatment at the hands of their respective masters. Their goal was freedom, which, claimed Hunter and Sharpe, was to be achieved by burning New York City and killing the white people on Manhattan. The Revolt During the early morning hours of Sunday, April 6, 1712, about two dozen conspirators, armed with guns, swords, knives, and clubs, gathered in an orchard in the East Ward on the northeast edge of New York City. They set fire to several outbuildings and waited in ambush for the whites who came to put out the blaze, killing nine and wounding seven. Soldiers were dispatched from the fort, but when they arrived, the rebels had dispersed, taking refuge in the woods surrounding the town. The next day, local militiamen systematically searched Manhattan Island for the rebellious slaves. Rather than surrender, six slaves killed themselves, several cutting their own throats. White New Yorkers were in full panic. “We have about 70 Negro’s in Custody,” read a dispatch from New York, dated April 14 but published in the Boston News-Letter on April 21, but it was “fear’d that most of the Negro’s here (who are very numerous) knew of the Late Conspiracy to murder the Christians.” Fear of another uprising drove the judicial proceedings. On April 9, a coroner’s jury implicated thirty-eight slaves, identifying fourteen of them as murderers. In accordance with the 1708 Conspiracy Act, the coroner’s findings were turned over to the Court of Quarter Sessions of the Peace, which convened on April 11. Attorney General May Bickley handled the prosecution, moving the trials on from the Quarter Sessions to the State Supreme Court on June 3. The Trials Forty-two slaves and one free black were indicted and tried. Crucial to both the indictments and trials was the testimony of two slaves, Cuffee, who belonged to baker Peter Vantilborough, and Dick, a boy slave owned by Harmanus Burger, a blacksmith.

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The coroner’s jury had found Cuffee and Dick guilty of at least two murders, but Attorney General Bickley apparently promised them immunity, and they became the Crown’s prime witnesses. Some whites, including such substantial citizens as former mayor David Provost, coroner Henry Wileman, and lawyers Jacob Regnier and David Jamison, testified for a few of the defendants. However, the general adequacy of defense counsel may well be doubted. Many of the convictions hinged upon the dubious testimony of Cuffee and young Dick, both of whom were manipulated by Attorney General Bickley, described by Governor Hunter as “a busy waspish man.” Bickley also demonstrated considerable bias against certain slave defendants, depending upon who owned them. For example, Mars, belonging to Jacob Regnier, a rival attorney with whom Brickley had a private quarrel, was tried twice and acquitted before being found guilty in the third trial and sentenced to be hanged. Most of the trials were over by early June. Twenty-three slaves were convicted of murder; fifteen slaves were acquitted, along with one free black. Two slaves were found guilty of assault with intent to kill, and two were acquitted of that charge. The twentyfive who were convicted were sentenced to death. Twenty were to be hanged; three were burned alive, one in a slow fire for eight to ten hours until consumed to ashes. Another was broken upon the wheel and left to die, and one was hung in chains and “so to continue without sustenance until death.” Eleven were “executed at once,” including those burned, broken at the wheel, and chained without food or water. These barbaric executions were defended by Governor Hunter as “the most exemplary that could be possibly thought of.” Yet even Hunter doubted the justice of it all. He postponed the execution of six slaves, including two Spanish American Indians taken during Queen Anne’s War (1702-1713) and sold as slaves despite their claim of being free men, a pregnant slave woman, and the much tried and finally convicted Mars. At Hunter’s request, the queen pardoned several of them, and perhaps all of those he had reprieved (the record is rather vague), despite the efforts of Bickley in New York and Lord Cornbury, a former governor of New York, in London to obstruct the pardons.

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Impact of the Revolt There were other ramifications of the slave uprising. The provincial government passed laws making it impossible to free slaves without putting up a two-hundred-pound bond and paying the freed slave twenty pounds per year for life. Africans, American Indians, and mulattoes were prohibited from inheriting or otherwise owning property. Finally, due process rights were weakened for slaves accused of murder or conspiracy. In the wake of the revolt, Elias Neau, the preacher and catechist of Trinity Church, found it difficult to continue his school for African Americans and Indians. Only two of his many pupils were implicated in the conspiracy, and Chaplain John Sharpe doubted that either was involved in the violence. After the rebellion, New Yorkers were reluctant to import slaves directly from Africa or to purchase Spanish Indians as slaves. Black slaves from the West Indies were preferred over the other two groups. Yet slavery remained a primary source of labor for both the province and city of New York, slaves constituting about 15 percent of the population. In 1730, other regulations were added to the slave code because “many Mischiefs had been Occasioned by the two great Liberty allowed to Negro and other Slaves.” In 1741, white paranoia and slave discontent provoked a so-called slave conspiracy in which 150 slaves and 25 whites were jailed. Of that number, 18 slaves and 4 whites were hanged, 13 African Americans burned alive, and 70 were sold and sent to the West Indies. Ronald W. Howard Further Reading Joel Tyler Headley’s The Great Riots of New York, 1712-1873 (New York: Thunder’s Mouth Press, 2004) covers the slave revolts. In Joyce D. Goodfriend’s Before the Melting Pot: Society and Culture in Colonial New York City, 1664-1730 (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1992), chapter 6 provides considerable insight into the life and labors of New York City slaves, both before and after the 1712 revolt. In Michael Kammen’s Colonial New York: A History (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1975), chapter 11 relates the slave revolts of 1712 and 1741 to larger social and economic prob-

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lems in colonial New York society. Mary Lou Lustig’s Robert Hunter, 1666-1734 (Syracuse, N.Y.: Syracuse University Press, 1983) gives a brief but pertinent summary of the slave revolts and the persons most associated with the trials. Edgar J. McManus’s A History of Negro Slavery in New York (Syracuse, N.Y.: Syracuse University Press, 1966) goes into considerable detail regarding the conditions that contributed to the 1712 uprising. Kenneth Scott’s “The Slave Insurrrection in New York in 1712,” in The New-York Historical Society Quarterly (45, January, 1961), describes the revolt and the trials that followed. Peter Woods’s “Slave Resistance,” in Encyclopedia of the North American Colonies, vol. 2 (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1993) relates the 1741 New York revolt to other examples of slave resistance in North America. See also Slave codes; Slavery; Stono Rebellion; Turner’s slave insurrection

New York riots The Event: Urban protests that erupted into large-scale violence Date: 1964 and 1967 Place: New York, New York The race-related riots in the streets of the city exemplify the turmoil throughout the nation over civil rights issues. The Civil Rights movement, in bringing attention to the inequality of legally imposed segregation in the South, also highlighted the de facto discrimination that affected the economic status and living conditions of African Americans in northern and western cities. Many African Americans became somewhat frustrated with the slow pace of the struggle for civil rights. The Riots On July 16, 1964, New York Police Department Lieutenant Thomas Gilligan shot and killed James Powell, a fifteen-yearold African American. The officer’s claim that he acted in selfdefense when Powell allegedly threatened him with a knife was not accepted by many African Americans. The Congress of Racial

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Equality (CORE) held a rally in Harlem two days later that turned into the 1964 New York riot. Three years later, on July 26, 1967, with racial tensions still high from a riot in the Puerto Rican area of East Harlem on July 23-25, about two hundred African Americans became involved in a riot after a rock concert in Central Park. The New York riots of 1964 and 1967 were typical of the urban unrest that accompanied the racial tensions of the decade. By 1964, African Americans were demanding equality, especially in the South where they faced legally imposed (de jure) discrimination, and to a lesser extent in the North, where they suffered from de facto discrimination. The U.S. Congress was considering new civil rights legislation, but many African Americans were angered by the more subtle discrimination and the economically bleak situation in the nation’s northern and western inner cities. The killing of Powell was simply a spark that served to ignite a dangerous situation. After the CORE rally on July 16, 1964, protesters marched to the police station, and rioting broke out. African Americans roamed the streets, breaking store windows and throwing bottles at police officers. The rioting continued until July 23, 1964. One African American was killed, five others were

Aftermath of racially motivated rioting in New York City in the summer of 1964. (Library of Congress)

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shot and wounded, eighty-one civilians and thirty-five police officers were injured, one hundred and twelve stores were looted, and one hundred and eighty-five people were arrested. On July 26, 1967, around two hundred African Americans marched down Fifth Avenue in New York City, looting stores and breaking windows after a concert in Central Park. An estimated twenty-six thousand dollars worth of goods was stolen, and twenty-two youths were arrested. Later, on July 29, 1967, more violence broke out but was quickly controlled. Impact The riots called national attention to the discrimination that affected African Americans in New York City. After the 1964 riots, which were the first urban race-related riots of the decade, President Lyndon B. Johnson ordered the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) to detect any possible violations of federal laws and to search for possible communist influence. Paul Screvane, the acting mayor of New York in 1964 declared that the Powell killing would go to trial and that more African American police officers would work in the area where the conflict took place. In 1967, race-related unrest erupted in cities all across the nation. The looting of New York City’s Fifth Avenue did not escalate into a major incident the way the 1964 unrest did because the city’s officers were better trained on how to handle the situation. The New York Police Department had also begun to employ a large number of African Americans on the force to prevent racial tensions from becoming overwhelming. Theresa R. Doggart Further Reading The Kerner Commission Report (1968) contains important information on race-related riots and the conditions that produced them, and The New York Times provides detailed accounts of both the 1964 and 1967 riots. See also Chicago riots; Civil Rights movement; Congress of Racial Equality; New York riots; Newark riot; Washington, D.C., riots; Watts riot

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Newark riot The Event: One of a series of major civil disorders of the 1960’s Date: July 12-17, 1967 Place: Newark, New Jersey In 1967, more than one hundred U.S. cities experienced riots, mostly in ghettos, directly affecting African American communities, law enforcement officials, and the entire nation. Although riots had occurred in the Watts section of Los Angeles in 1965 and in several cities in the summer of 1967, the disturbance in Newark, New Jersey, best illustrated the “tinderbox” concept— an eruption of violence lit by a slow burning fuse. By 1967, Newark had the highest daytime population turnover, venereal disease and maternal mortality rates, and population density in the nation. It had changed from being 85 percent white in 1940 to nearly 50 percent African American by 1965. During the three years before the 1967 riot, a series of incidents of police brutality, some involving deaths of young African American men, had occurred. In July, 1967, twenty-four thousand unemployed African Americans lived within Newark’s boundaries, an area of twentyfour square miles. Newark had proportionally the largest police force of any major city, yet its crime rate was among the highest. The Riot On July 12, another incident involving apparent police brutality occurred, the beating of cab driver John Smith, who had been stopped for traffic violations. Word of the incident traveled quickly through the taxi radio network and throughout the African American community, and the rumor spread that the police had killed Smith. Although this rumor was false, it was believable because of previous fatal incidents involving the police. Soon angry crowds gathered outside the police station where the officers had taken Smith. Rocks, bottles, and Molotov cocktails were thrown at the police station. The police rushed out of the station in a show of force, setting off days of rock throwing, window smashing, looting, car burning, and firebombing of businesses. Civil rights leaders and moderate African American ministers in-

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tervened and mediated, hoping to achieve a meaningful peace. Mayor Hugh Addonizio made some concessions to the group’s demands for reform. More militant elements of the community, including black nationalists and members of the Nation of Islam, denounced a commission appointed to examine what it termed “this isolated incident.” City police were called in, and although they made many arrests, the situation soon was out of control. On July 14, the mayor asked Governor Richard J. Hughes to send in state troopers and the National Guard. The 475 state troopers, 4,000 National Guardsmen, and 1,300 city police officers experienced immediate coordination and communications problems. The National Guard units had not been trained in riot control, and when sniper fire rang out, the troops, unable to pinpoint the origin of the shots, overreacted, spraying bullets throughout the congested area, hurting many innocent bystanders. At times, the three law enforcement groups mistakenly shot at each other, creating even more hysteria. During the course of three nights, law enforcement officers shot into buildings that bore signs indicating they were owned by African Americans. On July 17, Governor Hughes ordered an end to the state of emergency and removed the National Guard from Newark. Casualties included the deaths of 1 firefighter, 1 police officer, and 23 African Americans; 145 law enforcement officers and 580 civilians had been injured. In addition, 1,465 people were arrested, including 1,394 African Americans, 50 whites, and 21 Puerto Ricans. Property damage exceeded fifteen million dollars. The major participants were predominantly somewhat educated, unemployed young African American men. Rioters directed their hostility toward property; the only people they injured were police officers. Aftermath The Newark riot was followed later that month by rioting in Detroit, Michigan, in which forty-three people died. President Lyndon B. Johnson established the National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders, chaired by Illinois governor Otto Kerner, to determine the cause of the rioting, find ways to control it, and determine the role of law enforcement.

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In 1968, the Kerner Commission, as it was commonly known, concluded that typically, a series of tension-heightening incidents over time led to one “triggering or precipitating event” that set off the riots. The nationwide study concluded that police in Newark and elsewhere were involved in more than half of the incidents that preceded riots and led to an escalation of violence. Newark’s law enforcement efforts were found deficient. City police practices of overenforcement and harassment of people on the streets negated positive initiatives (such as mandatory human relations training and police community councils) taken by Director of Police Dominick Spina. Also, National Guard troops were found to be ill prepared for crowd control, unable to contain violence in densely populated areas, and far too eager to discharge their weapons. The Newark riot nationally dramatized the severe condition of people living in the nation’s ghettos. G. Thomas Taylor Further Reading Nathan Wright, Jr.’s classic Ready to Riot (1968) stresses the underlying causes and anatomy of the Newark riot from a community perspective, terming the disturbance a “racial rebellion.” The Kerner Commission Report (1968) presents the government commission’s findings from its nationwide study on the causes of riots and its prescriptions for prevention and change. See also Chicago riots; Kerner Commission; New York riots; Washington, D.C., riots; Watts riot

Newberry v. United States The Case: U.S. Supreme Court ruling on white primaries Date: May 2, 1921 The Supreme Court concluded that the federal government lacked the constitutional authority to regulate party primaries, a ruling that had the unintended consequence of disfranchising black citizens in the single-party South.

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In 1918, Truman H. Newberry, the Republican candidate for the U.S. Senate, was tried in Michigan, along with more than one hundred associates, for conspiring to violate the Federal Corrupt Practices Act of 1910. The statute violated had set a limit on campaign financing, and the indictment claimed that Newberry had exceeded this limit in primary and general election expenditures. Newberry and his associates were found guilty in the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Michigan. The U.S. Supreme Court reversed the conviction and sent the case back to the lower court, finding that the statute on which Newberry’s conviction rested had no constitutional authority. The Court argued that prior to the Seventeenth Amendment, the only part of the Constitution empowering Congress to regulate the election process was to be found in Article I, section 4, which pertained only to the time, place, and manner of holding general elections and failed to address such matters as party primaries and conventions, additions to the election process unforeseen by the Framers of the Constitution. Consequently, the Court ruled that in the relevant section of the Corrupt Practices Act, Congress had exceeded its authority. The Court also maintained that because the statute antedated the ratification of the Seventeenth Amendment, which extended congressional authority, it was invalid at the time of its enactment. The Court held that a power later acquired could not, ex proprio, validate a law that was unconstitutional at the time of its passing. The Court did not question a state’s right to regulate primaries and campaign financing, claiming that “the state may suppress whatever evils may be incident to primary or convention.” The Newberry ruling imposed an important barrier to the enfranchisement of black Americans in the single-party South. Although the Court would strike down laws expressly prohibiting African Americans from voting in primaries, as late as 1935, in Grovey v. Townsend, it upheld legal measures taken in Texas to bar African Americans from participating in the state Democratic convention, arguing that such “private” discrimination did not come under constitutional purview. Grovey and Newberry were finally successfully challenged in United

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States v. Classic (1941), which held that Congress had the authority to regulate both primary and general elections for federal offices. Three years later a final legal blow to de jure disfranchisement of African Americans was dealt in Smith v. Allwright (1944), which held that laws governing all elections—local, state, and federal— could be invalidated if they violated Article I, section 4 of the Constitution. Sponsored by the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, the plaintiff argued that Texas Democratic Party officials had denied him a primary ballot because of his race. The Supreme Court concurred, noting that state laws regulated both primary and general elections and were therefore responsible for barriers to the ballot box erected on racial grounds. See also Grovey v. Townsend; Jim Crow laws; Nixon v. Herndon; Poll taxes; Smith v. Allwright; United States v. Classic; Voting Rights Act of 1965

Niagara Movement Identification: Pioneering civil rights organization Date: 1905-1910 Place: Niagara Falls, Ontario, Canada A progenitor of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, the Niagara Movement helped to lay the groundwork for the modern Civil Rights movement. In the early years of the twentieth century, two major approaches to achieving African American progress were separated by their differing philosophies: Booker T. Washington was a pragmatist who acknowledged current policies toward African Americans and wanted to make their lives as easy as possible within that framework. Washington held that “it is important and right that all privileges of law be ours, but it is vastly more important that we be prepared for the exercise of those privileges.” He assumed that as African Americans became productive workers who were

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not troublemakers, they would be seen as valuable assets to U.S. society. Then they would slowly but surely move up the economic and political ladder. Beginnings The leaders of what came to be known as the Niagara Movement, by contrast, asserted that Washington’s programs would keep African Americans at the bottom of the political, economic, and social ladder. One of the Niagara Movement’s major leaders was W. E. B. Du Bois, a professor at Atlanta University at the beginning of the movement. Du Bois maintained that it was important for African Americans to press for the immediate implementation of their civil rights: “We want full manhood suffrage and we want it now. . . . We want the Constitution of the country enforced. . . . We want our children educated. . . . And we shall win!” The leaders of the Niagara Movement were convinced that as long as African Americans were not protected by law, economic and social advances would never come. They believed that the structures of United States society were developed in such a way that, without the force of law, other advances would never occur. These two different views of how to achieve progress for African Americans not only separated Washington and Du Bois throughout their lives but would remain at the heart of discord over how best to achieve freedom and progress for African Americans in the United States. The Niagara Movement was formed on July 11, 1905, when twenty-nine radical African American intellectuals, headed by Du Bois, met at Niagara Falls, in Ontario, Canada. (Even though some organizational activities were held in Buffalo, New York, on the other side of the U.S.-Canadian border, most meetings were held in Canada because of the difficulty of finding places in the United States that would accommodate African Americans.) On nearly every issue, the Niagara Movement stood in direct contrast to Washington’s approach. In sharp language, in a policy statement entitled the Negro Declaration of Independence, movement leaders placed full responsibility for the race problem on whites, denouncing the inequities of segregation

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and disfranchisement laws; they maintained that economic progress was not possible in a democratic society without the protection afforded by the ballot; and they insisted, above all, that African Americans could gain their rights only by agitation. Members of the Niagara Movement spoke out against an accommodationist approach at a time when almost all white and African American leaders believed that such policies were critical if African Americans were to achieve equality in U.S. society and politics. About five years after it had been established, the Niagara Movement had approximately four hundred members. Most were northern, urban, upper-class college graduates. The movement never developed the wide following it wanted. Some assert that the movement did not reach a broad enough spectrum in the African American community, let alone create an appeal to the broader society of which it was part. At first women were excluded from the Niagara Movement, both as members and as a focus of emancipation. Some of the movement’s organizers reasoned that fighting for women’s rights along with rights for African American males would result in defeat of the movement’s policies and goals. Du Bois, however, argued that African American civil rights would not be complete without women as well as men tasting the fruits of freedom. He argued that to obtain male suffrage on the backs of women was immoral and not in keeping with the solidarity that African Americans must maintain in the face of the hostility of the dominant white society. Du Bois’s position finally prevailed. The NAACP During its existence, the Niagara Movement held conferences in 1906, at Harpers Ferry, West Virginia; in 1907, at Boston, Massachusetts; and in 1908, at Oberlin, Ohio. Civil rights protests in cities across the nation were organized by the Niagara Movement, which gained a reputation for demanding recognition of the equality of all human beings through social protest and demonstrations. In the wake of a race riot in Springfield, Illinois, in 1908, the movement began to dissolve as members turned their attention to a new organization.

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On February 12, 1909, the ideas on which the Niagara Movement was founded were absorbed into the framework of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), which not only developed a wider following but also addressed the broader issues of equality and civil rights that the Niagara Movement was not able to address effectively. Important members of the Niagara Movement, such as Du Bois, became instrumental in the NAACP as well. Du Bois, however, decided that even the NAACP was not forceful enough in addressing issues such as lynching, rape, and voting rights. He would end his life in exile in Africa. Although the Niagara Movement survived only five years— formally disbanding in 1910—it had served as the foundation upon which later movements were built. It can be seen as both a negative reaction to Washington’s accommodationist approach to African American equality and the progenitor of such later groups as the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), and the Black Panthers. Paul Barton-Kriese Further Reading W. Haywood Burns’s The Voices of Negro Protest in America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1963) discusses twentieth century protest movements, highlighting the NAACP. W. E. B. Du Bois’s The Souls of Black Folk (1903; reprint, New York: Vintage Books, 1990) is Du Bois’s powerful argument that black U.S. citizens will progress only via challenge, struggle, and political protest. Floyd B. McKissick’s Three-fifths of a Man (New York: Macmillan, 1969) is an account of the racial basis of the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, and the Emancipation Proclamation, with an examination of how these documents have influenced race relations. Donald G. Nieman’s Promises to Keep: African-Americans and the Constitutional Order, 1776 to the Present (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991) is a constitutional history of the United States with special reference to charting the impact of the Constitution on U.S. social history. Booker T. Washington’s Up from Slavery (1901; reprint, New

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York: Gramercy Books, 1993) describes his idea of the “talented tenth” and how black citizens of the United States will achieve full equality gradually, through hard work and demonstrating their worthiness; a direct contrast to the more aggressive platform of Du Bois. See also Atlanta Compromise; Congress of Racial Equality; Education; Nation of Islam; National Association for the Advancement of Colored People; Negro Conventions; Southern Christian Leadership Conference; Talented Tenth; Universal Negro Improvement Association

Nixon v. Condon The Case: U.S. Supreme Court ruling on white primaries Date: May 2, 1932 In the second round of the white primary cases, the Supreme Court struck down an exclusion of African Americans from primary elections by a party’s executive committee, holding that the committee was acting as an agent of the state. In Nixon v. Herndon (1927), the Supreme Court unanimously overturned a law that directly excluded African Americans from voting in the primaries. The Texas legislature responded by authorizing the political parties’ executive committees to set qualifications for primary elections. The Democratic committee quickly limited the primaries to whites only. When A. L. Nixon, an African American physician, challenged his exclusion, the Democratic Party asserted that the equal protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment did not apply to private organizations. Speaking for a 5-4 majority, Justice Benjamin N. Cardozo ruled narrowly that state action was involved because a state statute had vested the executive committee with its authority to set voting qualifications. The discrimination, therefore, violated the Fourteenth Amendment. The Texas legislature responded by repealing all primary election statutes and giving full control over

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the primaries to the political parties. This approach to African American disfranchisement would continue until Smith v. Allwright (1944). Thomas Tandy Lewis See also Gerrymandering; Grovey v. Townsend; Nixon v. Herndon; Smith v. Allwright; Voting Rights Act of 1965; White primaries

Nixon v. Herndon The Case: U.S. Supreme Court ruling on white primaries Date: March 7, 1927 In the first of a series of white primary cases, the Supreme Court overturned a Texas statute that explicitly prohibited African Americans from voting in Democratic Party primaries. In 1921, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in Newberry v. United States that Congress lacked authority to regulate primary elections. Southern state legislatures immediately took advantage of this decision to prohibit black participation in state primary elections. “White primaries” were quickly adopted throughout the South. Texas, during the first half of the twentieth century, was part of the Democrat-dominated South. The only competition that mattered was within the Democratic Party, so if African Americans were not allowed to participate in the Democratic primary they would effectively be denied any meaningful choice in the electoral process. In 1924, the Texas legislature passed a law barring African Americans from voting in the Democratic primary. L. A. Nixon, a black resident of El Paso, attempted to vote in the primary and was refused by Herndon, an election judge. Nixon and the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) claimed that the Texas law violated the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments. The Supreme Court did not deal with the issue of the Fifteenth Amendment, but a unanimous Court found that the Texas white primary law violated the equal protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment.

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The NAACP won the battle but temporarily lost the war. Texas responded to the Court’s decision by engaging in the strategy of “legislate and litigate.” By passing a different white primary law after their defeat in Nixon v. Herndon, the Texas legislature forced the NAACP to institute another attack on the white primary. When the second law was declared unconstitutional in Nixon v. Condon in 1932, Texas came up with a third variation of the white primary. This time, in Grovey v. Townsend (1935), the U.S. Supreme Court upheld the Texas white primary, arguing that no state discrimination was present. According to the Court, the Texas Democratic Party, a private voluntary association, decided to exclude African Americans from voting in the primary elections. It was not until Smith v. Allwright (1944) that a unanimous Supreme Court declared that the Fifteenth Amendment could be used as a shield to protect the right to vote in primary elections. From the passage of the first white primary law in 1924 until the final abolition of white primaries in the Smith case in 1944, African Americans were denied the right to vote in Democratic Party primaries, the only election of significance at that time. The white primary cases illustrate one of the dilemmas in using the federal courts—the fact that justice delayed is justice denied. Darryl Paulson See also Gerrymandering; Grovey v. Townsend; National Association for the Advancement of Colored People; Newberry v. United States; Nixon v. Condon; Smith v. Allwright; White primaries

Norris v. Alabama The Case: U.S. Supreme Court ruling on jury composition Date: April 1, 1935 In its second ruling on Alabama’s Scottsboro rape case, the Supreme Court held that the African American defendants had been denied a fair trial because black citizens had been systematically excluded from juries.

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The repeated convictions of nine young African Americans, known as the “Scottsboro Boys,” on unsubstantiated rape charges raised questions about the fairness of the American criminal justice system. (National Archives)

In Powell v. Alabama (1932), the Supreme Court ruled that the conviction of the “Scottsboro boys,” a group of young African American men, without effective assistance of counsel violated the Fourteenth Amendment’s due process requirement. After defendant Clarence Norris was sentenced to death in a second trial, his lawyers presented evidence of systematic racial exclusion from both the grand jury and trial jury. Writing for a unanimous Court, Chief Justice Charles Evans Hughes reversed the conviction as inconsistent with the due process and equal protection clauses. In both Powell and Norris, the justices ruled on the basis of immutable principles of justice and declined the opportunity to make the Sixth Amendment explicitly binding on the states through the Fourteenth Amendment. Thomas Tandy Lewis See also Batson v. Kentucky; Edmonson v. Leesville Concrete Company; Fourteenth Amendment; Powell v. Alabama; Powers v. Ohio

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The North Star Identification: Short-lived newspaper published by Frederick Douglass Date: Initial publication December 3, 1847 Place: Rochester, New York The North Star was the vehicle for the first of Frederick Douglass’s newspaper campaigns against slavery and for abolition. When the first issue of The North Star appeared on December 3, 1847, critics and readers discovered a newspaper that blended sardonic humor with moral urgency, written in a polished style. Some readers, however, were skeptical of editor Frederick Douglass’s sophistication. Fathered by a white man and born to the slave Harriet Bailey in Talbot County, Maryland, Frederick Bailey had worked in bondage as a slave for Thomas Auld, witnessing the horrors of slavery, the brutal beatings, and even murder. In his teens, he had taught himself to read and write from a discarded speller and copybook, and learned public speaking by imitating orations appearing in The Columbian Orator, an abolitionist publication. The Columbian Orator led to his awareness of the abolitionist movement and influenced his writing style when he later published The North Star. Clashing with his master in 1838, Frederick escaped from Baltimore to New York with Anna Murray, a free African American domestic servant. Once married, they settled in New Bedford, Massachusetts, which offered sanctuary. To prevent recapture, Frederick changed his surname to Douglass, in honor of a character in Sir Walter Scott’s 1810 poem Lady of the Lake. Douglass and Garrison Douglass became active in local abolitionist gatherings, discovering his gift as a compelling speaker who provided firsthand examples of barbaric slavery. He became a favorite on the lecture circuit during the early 1840’s; his autobiography, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass (1845), sold more than thirty thousand copies over the next five years. Douglass came under the tutelage of the leading abolitionist of the times, a white man named Wil-

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liam Lloyd Garrison. From Garrison’s abolitionist newspaper, The Liberator, Douglass no doubt learned much about newspaper operations. As Douglass’s fame increased, so did his risk of capture as an escaped slave. In 1845, he sailed for England, then on to Scotland and Ireland, where he passionately lectured on the inhumane treatment of slaves. His newfound friends, moved by his personal plight, arranged to purchase Douglass’s freedom for $711.66. Before returning to the United States in 1847, he also received $2,175 to bankroll his own antislavery newspaper. When Garrison objected to Douglass’s projected newspaper, the two close friends became estranged, then bitter enemies. Douglass believed that the white abolitionists thought him a child to be led. African Americans, he insisted, must lead to gain respect. He held that his newspaper could create that leadership and help increase self-respect among African Americans. Douglass knew of the hazards in starting an African American newspaper, because about one hundred such papers already existed in the United States, the first having been started in 1827. He located in Rochester, New York, because of the area’s strong antislavery sentiments and because publishing there reduced the

Frederick Douglass, founder and editor of The North Star. (Library of Congress)

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competition with The Liberator in Boston and the National AntiSlavery Standard in New York City. On December 3, 1847, the first issue of The North Star appeared—a four-page weekly with a subscription cost of two dollars per year, circulation of two to three thousand, and publishing costs of eighty dollars per week at the first print shop owned by an African American. Douglass chose journalist Martin Delaney as coeditor, but the two soon clashed over the issue of “colonization,” by which freed slaves would seek a separate homeland in Africa rather than integrate within the United States white society. When a disgusted Delaney left in 1848 to found a colony in the Niger Valley, in Africa, Douglass became sole editor, vigorously espousing the principles of integration, as he did throughout his life. Advocacy for All In the first issue of The North Star, Douglass urged African Americans to become politically active and pledged that his newspaper would aggressively attack slavery, work to free southern slaves, and promote African American morality and progress. The lead article recounted the convention of “colored people” of 1847, with its primary objectives of abolishing slavery and elevating free African Americans. In subsequent years, The North Star dealt with a plethora of burning issues: injustice, inequality, racism, the avoidance of drink and dissipation, the benefits of integrated school systems, the elimination of segregated hotels and railroads, the folly of war and capital punishment, the worth of laborers, the imperative need for racial unity among African Americans, and the unfair voting practices leveled against African Americans in northern states. The North Star came to the defense not only of persecuted African Americans but also of American Indians, the Irish, and other immigrant groups. From its beginnings, The North Star lived up to its masthead: “Right Is Of No Sex—Truth Is Of No Color—God Is The Father Of Us All, and All We Are Brethren.” Douglass vigorously supported the women’s rights movement, linking enslaved women to the abolition movement itself. At the Seneca Falls Convention

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in 1848, Douglass was the only one of the thirty-two men attending to speak and vote in favor of Elizabeth Cady Stanton’s Declaration of Sentiments, which demanded equality for women. He effectively used The North Star to promote Stanton’s feminist cause. Subsequent Papers Financially, The North Star foundered after six months. Douglass mortgaged his house and used his lecture fees to keep the paper going. From time to time, he received financial gifts from Gerrit Smith, a philanthropist, reformer, and wealthy New York landowner. In 1851, the two men agreed to merge the financially troubled North Star with Smith’s struggling Liberty Party Paper. Douglass maintained editorial control over the paper while including political news of the Liberty Party; he broadened his readership to four thousand; and he accepted a comfortable subsidy from Smith. The new effort, Frederick Douglass’ Paper, appeared in June, 1851, and lasted until 1859. The paper continued Douglass’s efforts in regard to abolition, equality, and women’s rights. Douglass also dabbled in the Liberty Party campaigns, endorsing Smith and helping him win a seat in Congress. In 1852, Douglass himself became the first African American nominated for vice president on the Equal Rights Party ticket of 1852. Recurring financial problems forced Douglass to reduce the size and frequency of his paper in 1859. His third effort, Douglass’ Monthly, circulating in England as well as in the United States, lasted until the middle of the Civil War, 1863. Like the other two papers, Douglass’ Monthly remained a magnet for African American writers and reformers and framed Douglass’s own inimitable style and wit as well. He actively recruited African American soldiers for the war. He viewed Abraham Lincoln as the best hope for his race, pressing for the Emancipation Proclamation that Lincoln delivered in 1863. He proposed land reform, federally financed education, and a national association for African Americans. He believed that interracial marriages would someday eliminate racial hatred. After the Civil War, Douglass moved to Washington, D.C. There he published the New National Era, focusing on the interests

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of the newly freed African Americans. During that paper’s existence, from 1870 to 1873, Douglass editorialized on Reconstruction, the rise of mob lynchings in the South, race relations, politics, labor, and education. From 1873 until his death in 1895, Douglass continued to be heard on the lecture circuit and in leading newspapers. A self-made man, rising against great odds from slavery to publisher, race leader, prominent abolitionist, social reformer, and political activist, Douglass is one of the most important African Americans of the nineteenth century and became a powerful symbol in the Civil Rights movement throughout the twentieth century. Richard Whitworth Further Reading Frederick Douglass’s The Frederick Douglass Papers, edited by John W. Blassingame and John R. McKivigan (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1979-1992), is a reconstruction of Douglass’s thoughts and opinions from fragmentary newspapers, such as The North Star, and manuscript sources. Nathan I. Huggins’s Slave and Citizen: The Life of Frederick Douglass (Boston: Little, Brown, 1980) portrays Douglass as troubled and self-contradictory at times. Waldo E. Martin’s The Mind of Frederick Douglass (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1984) focuses on Douglass’s formative years and the reworking of his views on slavery, inequality, and injustice. William B. Rogers’s “We Are All Together Now”: Frederick Douglass, William Lloyd Garrison, and the Prophetic Tradition (New York: Garland, 1995) juxtaposes the values, beliefs, and actions of Douglass and Garrison. Frederick S. Voss’s Majestic in His Wrath: A Pictorial Life of Frederick Douglass (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1995) brings together rare photos and commentary to commemorate the centennial of Douglass’s death. See also Abolition; Emancipation Proclamation; Liberator, The; Underground Railroad

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Northwest Ordinance The Law: National legislation concerning the organization and administration of the North West Territory Date: Enacted on July 13, 1787 The last major legislation passed under the Articles of Confederation, the Northwest Ordinance laid out rules for organization of the Northwest Territory and was the first sectional compromise over the extension of slavery. In March, 1784, the Congress of the Confederation accepted the cession of lands Virginia had claimed west of the Appalachian Mountains. A congressional committee headed by Thomas Jefferson, delegate from Virginia, then took steps to provide for the political organization of the vast area south of the Great Lakes, west of the Appalachians, and east of the Mississippi River. The committee’s task was to draft legislation for the disposal of the land and the government of its settlers. The proposal of Jefferson’s committee met the approval of Congress as the Ordinance of 1784. The Ordinance of 1784 divided the West into eighteen districts. Each district would be admitted to the Union as a state when its population equaled that of the least populous of the original states. In the meantime, when the population of a district reached twenty thousand, it might write a constitution and send a delegate to Congress. As Jefferson envisaged it, as many as ten new states might be carved from the new lands, many of them provided with mellifluous classical names. In Jefferson’s original version, slavery was to be excluded after 1800, but this was stricken from the ordinance when it was adopted in 1784. The Ordinance of 1784 was to become effective once all western lands claimed by the states had been ceded to the government. Before the states ceded their lands, however, a new ordinance was adopted that superseded that of 1784. The Ordinance of 1787 The Ordinance of 1787, known as the Northwest Ordinance, was passed, according to some historians, at the insistence of land

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speculators who opposed the liberality of the Ordinance of 1784. The new ordinance did indeed slow down the process by which a territory might become a state, but it also added certain important features and provided for the more orderly creation of new states. While the Northwest Ordinance may have been less liberal than its predecessor, it was not undemocratic. The Northwest Ordinance established government in the territory north of the Ohio River. The plan provided for the eventual establishment of a bicameral assembly, the creation of three to five states equal to the original thirteen states, freedom of religion, the right to a jury trial, public education, and a ban on the expansion of slavery. To accomplish these goals, legislation provided that the whole Northwest region should be governed temporarily as a single territory and administered by a governor, a secretary, and three judges appointed by Congress. When the population of the territory reached five thousand free, adult, male inhabitants, the citizens might elect representatives to a territorial assembly. Property qualifications for voting were established, but they were small. The general assembly was to choose ten men, all of whom owned at least five hundred acres, from whom Congress would choose five men to serve as the upper house of the legislature. The governor would continue to be selected by Congress and have an absolute veto over all legislation. The territory was to be divided into not fewer than three nor more than five districts. Whenever the population of one of the districts reached sixty thousand free inhabitants, it would be allowed to draft a constitution and submit it to Congress. If the constitution guaranteed a republican form of government, Congress would pass an enabling act admitting the district into the Union as a state on an equal basis with those states already in the Union. The ordinance guaranteed certain basic rights to citizens who moved into the new lands. A bill of rights provided for freedom of religion and guaranteed the benefits of writs of habeas corpus, the right of trial by jury, bail, and the general process of law. The third article read: “Religion, morality and knowledge being necessary to good government and the happiness of mankind, Schools and the means of education shall forever be encouraged. The utmost good faith shall always be observed towards the Indi-

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ans.” The first of these moral injunctions was implemented as the inhabitants obtained the means to do so. The second, regarding the American Indians, has still to be achieved. The fourth article established the basis for relations between the general government and the territories and states that might be formed from them. Prohibition on Slavery The fifth article provided for equitable taxation and the free navigation of the waters leading into the Mississippi and St. Lawrence Rivers. The sixth article was epoch-making. It read: “There shall be neither Slavery nor involuntary Servitude in the said territory otherwise than in the punishment of crimes, whereof the party shall have been duly convicted.” This provision determined that the society that developed north of the Ohio River would eventually be free. Influenced by the French slaveholders inhabiting the region, the interpretation of Article VI forbade the further introduction of slavery but did not abolish slavery or affect the rights of those holding slaves prior to 1787. No such provision was written into the act establishing the Southwest Territory, in 1790. The pattern established by the Northwest Ordinance was more or less followed in the later admission of states into the Union. Some, such as Texas and California, came in without a territorial period. Others, such as Michigan, caused trouble because of boundary disputes with neighboring states. As for the Ohio country, Arthur St. Clair, president of the Confederation Congress in 1787, was appointed first governor of the territory. Indiana Territory was organized in 1803, the same year in which Ohio entered the Union. Indiana entered as a state in 1816, Illinois in 1818, Michigan in 1837, and Wisconsin in 1848. Statehood was delayed for Indiana and Illinois territories as a result of their repeated petitions seeking repeal of the restrictions in the ordinance against the expansion of further slavery in the territory. Congress refused to repeal or revise the section, making slaveholders reluctant to move into the area. The predominant settlement by nonslaveholders eventually led to strengthening of the antislavery movement in the region.

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The Northwest Ordinance proved to be a crowning legislative achievement of the otherwise lackluster confederation government. However, while Congress was debating the Northwest Ordinance, the constitutional convention was occurring in Philadelphia. It has been argued that the antislavery provisions influenced the debates of the constitutional convention over congressional representation. Since each state won two seats in the Senate, southern states acceded freedom to the Northwest Territory by limiting the number of free states formed from the region. In turn, the southern states hoped for dominance in the House of Representatives through the three-fifths clause counting slaves for congressional representation. Under the new Constitution, Congress reenacted the Ordinance of 1787 as a model of territorial government. John G. Clark Updated by Dorothy C. Salem Further Reading Berwanger, Eugene H. “Western Prejudice and the Extension of Slavery.” Civil War History 12 (September, 1966): 197-212. Demonstrates the racial prejudices following the emigration of Europeans westward and how these attitudes influenced the interpretations of the Northwest Ordinance—not forbidding slavery but halting its further introduction. Cayton, Andrew R. L. The Midwest and the Nation: Rethinking the History of an American Region. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990. Provides an overview of the historical significance of the Northwest Ordinance for the Midwest and its influence on that region. Johnson, Andrew J. The Life and Constitutional Thought of Nathan Dane. New York: Garland, 1987. The best biographical account of the major author of the Northwest Ordinance and his place in the history of the new nation. Konig, David Thomas. Devising Liberty: Preserving and Creating Freedom in the New American Republic. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1995. Examines the role of the Northwest Ordinance within the framework shaping modern U.S. freedom.

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Onuf, Peter S. Sovereignty and Territory: Claims Conflict in the Old Northwest and the Origins of the American Federal Republic. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1973. Analyzes the land speculation conflicts and their role in shaping the powers of the state. ____________. Statehood and Union: A History of the Northwest Ordinance. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987. A comprehensive study of the framing and impact of the Northwest Ordinance and the competing forces that shaped the document. Swierenga, Robert P. “The Settlement of the Old Northwest: Ethnic Pluralism in a Featureless Plain.” Journal of the Early Republic 9 (Spring, 1989): 73-105. Describes the settlement of the territory by foreign-born and American-born immigrants who influenced the ethnic pluralism of the region. See also Compromise of 1850; Fugitive Slave Law of 1793; Missouri Compromise; Slavery

One-drop rule Definition: Definition of race holding that a person with any amount of African ancestry—even as little as “one drop” of blood—should be legally and socially classified as black Although there is no scientific definition of a “pure” race, some people believe in the “one-drop” rule and wish to keep the dominant group racially “pure” and delegate all “impure” people to the subordinate or stigmatized group. The one-drop rule originated in the southern United States before the Civil War was rigidly conceptualized. As a consequence, a few black-white mixed-race individuals (who physically appeared white) were accepted as white by the dominant white culture. White attitudes became more rigid at the time of the Civil War, and the one-drop rule became strictly enforced and largely accepted throughout the United States. In 1896, the U.S. Supreme Court (in Plessy v. Ferguson) approved the one-drop rule as a legal definition by defining it as “common knowledge.”

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Although state laws against mixed-race marriages (miscegenation) were declared illegal by the Supreme Court in 1967, the one-drop rule still applies in some states. Socially, some whites support the rule to maintain “white racial purity,” and some African Americans support it to keep from losing members of their group to the dominant white group. The one-drop rule is unique to the United States. Abraham D. Lavender See also Demographic trends; Miscegenation laws; Plessy v. Ferguson

Orangeburg massacre The Event: Killing of three African Americans by campus police at a predominantly black southern college Date: February 8, 1968 Place: Orangeburg, South Carolina The Orangeburg massacre was the first incident of U.S. college students being killed by police because of protesting, but the killings received almost no national attention, largely because many white Americans had developed negative attitudes toward black protesters following a series of urban riots in 1967. On Thursday night, February 8, 1968, three African Americans (two male college students and the teenage son of a college employee) were killed by police gunfire on the campus of the almost entirely black South Carolina State College in Orangeburg. Twenty-seven other students were injured. Nearly all were shot in the back or side as they attempted to flee an unannounced fusillade of police gunfire. One police officer had been seriously injured by an object thrown at the police, but despite uncorrected false reports in the media, the students were unarmed. African American students had started protesting three nights earlier because the only bowling alley in Orangeburg continued to exclude African Americans despite pleas from local white and black leaders and students.

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Twenty-seven months after Orangeburg, the killing of four white students by National Guard troops at Kent State University in Ohio during a Vietnam War protest received international publicity. Jack Bass and Jack Nelson’s The Orangeburg Massacre (1970, revised 1984) is a detailed study of the massacre. A campus monument memorializes Henry Smith, Samuel Hammond, Jr., and Delano Middleton, whose lives were taken “in pursuit of human justice.” Abraham D. Lavender Further Reading Bass, Jack, and Jack Nelson. The Orangeburg Massacre. 2d ed., rev. and enl. Introduction by Will D. Campbell. Macon, Ga.: Mercer University Press, 1996. See also Civil Rights movement; Colfax massacre; Segregation

Palmer v. Thompson The Case: U.S. Supreme Court ruling on racial discrimination in public accommodations Date: June 14, 1971 In this ruling, the U.S. Supreme Court refused to seek out racially discriminatory intent in cases in which local government decisions appeared to be neutral. Justice Hugo L. Black wrote the opinion for the 5-4 majority, upholding the decision of the city of Jackson, Mississippi, to close a public swimming pool rather than operate it as an integrated facility. Lower federal courts had ordered the pool to be integrated, and the city closed it rather than comply. African Americans thought this showed a clear discriminatory intent, but the Supreme Court was reluctant to go beyond the plausible nondiscriminatory reason the city offered for its decision. Chief Justice Warren E. Burger concurred, and Justices William O. Douglas, Byron R. White, Thurgood Marshall, and William J. Brennan, Jr., dissented, finding that there was sufficient evidence of discrimi-

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natory intent to justify overturning this local government decision as a violation of the Fourteenth Amendment’s equal protection clause. The Court subsequently moved more in the direction of the dissenters’ point of view. Richard L. Wilson See also Fourteenth Amendment; Segregation

Pan-Africanism Definition: Broad international movement aimed at the political unification of Africa through the destruction of European colonialism Pan-Africanism is a worldwide movement that owes its creation to American and West Indian intellectuals. An international concept with roots in the nineteenth century, Pan-Africanism encompasses the goals of achieving full political independence and freedom of all peoples of African descent in Africa, the West Indies, the Americas, and other concentrated areas. Periodic Pan-African Congresses, which began in London in 1900, have provided forums at which people of African descent from around the world have shared ideas and helped to inspire one another. The movement was originally promoted by American and West Indian intellectuals, such as W. E. B. Du Bois—who is credited as the founder of the concept—and George Padmore, a West Indian intellectual. Both men were strong advocates and key theoreticians of the Pan-African ideology. Pan-Africanist philosophy also significantly influenced the early leaders of modern postcolonial nations with large black populations. Among these leaders are Ghana’s Kwame Nkrumah, Trindidad and Tobago’s Eric Williams, Jamaica’s Norman Manley, Egypt’s Gamal Abdel Nasser, and Kenya’s Jomo Kenyatta. These leaders espoused and utilized Pan-African concepts in forming their own organizations to advance the liberation of peoples of African descent. Marcus Garvey’s Back-to-Africa social movement in the 1920’s was the

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Marcus Garvey, founder of the Universal Negro Improvement Association, was a leading proponent of Pan-Africanism and black nationalism in the United States during the 1920’s. (Library of Congress)

largest and best approximation of this movement in the United States. Finally, this movement can also be regarded as the theoretical precursor to the black nationalism movement that swept the United States in the 1960’s. Aubrey W. Bonnett See also African Liberation Day; American Colonization Society; Black nationalism; Black Power movement; Universal Negro Improvement Association

Patterson v. McLean Credit Union The Case: U.S. Supreme Court ruling on racial discrimination Date: June 15, 1989 The Supreme Court reargued this racial discrimination case, apparently intending to overturn a remaining provision of the 1866 Civil Rights Act, but backed off in the face of widespread controversy. In Patterson, the Supreme Court was asked to determine whether an African American woman’s charge of racially motivated em-

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ployment harassment was a cause of action under Title 42, section 1981, a surviving part of the 1866 Civil Rights Act. The Court had used this provision of the 1866 act as a way of stopping racial discrimination in private and contractual relationships in Runyon v. McCrary (1976) and Jones v. Alfred H. Mayer Company (1968). The Court ordered a reargument and decided to determine whether Runyon should be overturned. Its action resulted in deep internal division and widespread criticism in the country. The majority believed there was need to issue a written defense of its reargument order in writing. Upon reargument, the Court decided unanimously not to overturn Runyon but limited the scope of the ruling dramatically. The Court, however, ruled five to four that section 1981 did not apply to what an employer did after entering into a contract with an employee and, therefore, that the woman’s claims of racial harassment after her hiring did not fall under section 1981. Not only were there four dissents on this issue, but Congress quickly passed the 1991 Civil Rights Act, which restored the legal standard in use prior to the Patterson ruling. Richard L. Wilson See also Buchanan v. Warley; Jones v. Alfred H. Mayer Company; Katzenbach v. McClung; Reitman v. Mulkey; Runyon v. McCrary; Shelley v. Kraemer

Pennsylvania Society for the Abolition of Slavery Identification: First antislavery society in America Date: Founded on April 14, 1775 Place: Philadelphia, Pennsylvania This organization is credited with developing an abolitionist philosophy and served as a model for other antislavery groups. On April 14, l775, a group of men gathered at the Sun Tavern on Second Street in Philadelphia to establish the first antislavery so-

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ciety in America. After electing John Baldwin their president and adopting a constitution, they named their organization the Society for the Relief of Free Negroes Unlawfully Held in Bondage. Sixteen of the twenty-four founders were members of the Society of Friends, or Quakers. The creation of this antislavery society was instigated when Philadelphia Quakers Israel Pemberton and Thomas Harrison aided Native American Dinah Neville and her children, who were being detained in Philadelphia pending their shipment to the West Indies to be sold as slaves. Harrison was fined in a Philadelphia court for giving protection to the Neville family. When this incident gained notoriety, members of the Quaker Philadelphia Meeting mobilized to form the antislavery society. At its first meeting, the antislavery society enlisted legal counsel to help the Nevilles and five other victims illegally held in bondage and to form a standing committee to investigate any conditions of slavery in the Philadelphia area. The Revolutionary War interrupted regular meetings until 1784. At this time, Quaker abolitionist Anthony Benezet revived the antislavery society as members learned that two African Americans had committed suicide rather than be illegally enslaved. Benezet increased the membership to forty, including Benjamin Franklin, James Pemberton, and Dr. Benjamin Rush. The society renamed itself the Pennsylvania Society for Promoting the Abolition of Slavery, for the Relief of Free Negroes Unlawfully Held in Bondage, and for Improving the Condition of the African Race. Since the majority of the members were Friends, the group developed directly from Quaker religious beliefs and within the Quaker social structure. To explore the founding of the Pennsylvania Society for the Abolition of Slavery, it is critical to trace events and movements within the Society of Friends in seventeenth century colonial Pennsylvania. Principles of the Society One of the basic principles espoused by Quaker founder George Fox was that all people are created equal. On a visit to the colonies in l671, Fox spoke at Friends meetings and encouraged Quaker slaveholders to free their slaves after a specified

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period of service. In l676, Quaker William Edmundson, an associate of Fox, published the first antislavery literature in Rhode Island. While Quakers were formulating an antislavery position early in their movement, German Mennonites migrating to America had vowed that they would not own slaves. Several members of the Mennonite community and Dutch Pietists adopted Quakerism and became members of the Friends Germantown Meeting. These German Quakers, their minister Pastorius, and other Friends of the Germantown Meeting delivered a petition to the Philadelphia Meeting in l688 demanding that slavery and the slave trade be abolished. The protest addressed to slave owners of the Philadelphia Monthly Meeting challenged these Friends to explain why they had slaves and how such a practice could exist in a colony founded on the principles of liberty and equality. Representing the radical leadership of Philadelphia Friends, George Keith published a tract entitled An Exhortation and Caution to Friends Concerning Buying or Keeping of Negroes. He gave several directives: that Friends should not purchase African slaves except for the express purpose of setting them free, that those already purchased should be set free after a time of reason-

Illustration from an antislavery pamphlet depicting the abuses of slavery. Antislavery societies published numerous tracts calling attention to the horrors of slavery. (Library of Congress)

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able service, and that, while in service, slaves should be given a Christian education and taught how to read. Conflicting Behavior During the early eighteenth century, the conservative, wealthy membership of the Philadelphia Meeting took a somewhat confusing position on slavery. Their inconsistent policies included a separate meeting for African Americans, a request that Quakers in the West Indies stop shipping slaves to Philadelphia, and disciplinary measures for members of the meeting who were engaged in antislavery activity. Many prominent Quakers, such as James Logan, Jonathan Dickinson, and Isaac Norris, continued to purchase and own slaves. The customary procedure of resolving issues at Friends meetings was to achieve a consensus by gaining a sense of the meeting. Thus, the Quaker drift toward an antislavery sentiment gained momentum with the efforts of a few radicals but achieved success only when the majority bowed to the principles of Quaker conscience. Unpopular radical member Benjamin Lay was unwelcome at the Philadelphia Meeting because of his unorthodox promotion of the antislavery cause. For example, Lay once had kidnapped a Quaker youth in order to illustrate the tragedy of abduction of African children for the slave trade. In 1738, he outdid himself at the Philadelphia Yearly Meeting, wearing a military uniform to emphasize the connection between slavery and war and concealing under his cloak an animal bladder that he had filled with red juice. Delivering an inflamed speech on the evils of slavery, he concluded by saying that slavery took the very lifeblood out of the slave, simultaneously piercing the bladder and splashing the horrified audience with simulated blood. By the 1730’s, the effects of the antislavery movement were evident among Quakers as more Friends provided for the manumission of their slaves in their wills. In addition, the increased immigration of Germans in need of work eliminated the demand for slave labor in the Middle Colonies. Much of the credit for the success of the antislavery movement among Quakers must be given to New Jersey Quaker John Wool-

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man. Known for his gentle, persuasive approach as a Quaker minister, he began a series of visitations to Quaker slaveholders in New England, the Middle Colonies, and the South in 1743. In l754, he published Some Considerations on the Keeping of Negroes, which proclaimed the evils of slavery and the absolute necessity for Friends to free their slaves. Meetings throughout the colonies and England effectively used his visitations to pressure Quakers to free their slaves. By l774, Quaker meetings in England, New England, and Pennsylvania had adopted sanctions to disown any member for buying slaves or for serving as executor of an estate that included slaves. It also required slaveholders to treat their slaves humanely and to emancipate them as soon as possible. Quaker Motives Some have argued that Quakers were willing to emancipate their slaves because slavery was not profitable in Pennsylvania in the absence of labor-intensive agriculture. Others claim that Quaker sensitivity to antislavery was aroused not by their own religious ideals but rather by eighteenth century Enlightenment philosophy, which held that liberty is a natural human right. These may be considered arguments; nevertheless, it was the Quakers who first championed the antislavery cause and who organized the first antislavery group in America. The Pennsylvania Society for the Abolition of Slavery served as a model for other antislavery groups. As early as 1794, other states that had formed antislavery societies were asked to send representatives to Philadelphia for annual meetings. As new associations were formed, Friends constituted a majority of the membership. Statesmen such as Franklin, Rush, Alexander Hamilton, John Jay, and Thomas Paine believed that the institution of slavery contradicted the ideals of the Declaration of Independence and joined in support of the Friends antislavery campaign. Emily Teipe Further Reading Davis, David Brion. The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Revolution, 1770-1823. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1975. An ex-

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haustive study of the slave question immediately before the American Revolution and in the succeeding federal period, which includes the pioneering efforts of the Quakers. Frost, J. William, ed. The Quaker Origins of Antislavery. Norwood, Pa.: Norwood Editions, 1980. A history of the Quaker antislavery cause that includes a comprehensive collection of Quaker documents. James, Sydney V. A People Among Peoples: Quaker Benevolence in Eighteenth Century America. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1963. This classic work discusses antislavery as an outreach of Quaker religious piety, along with the Quakers’ other efforts for the good of the social order. Nash, Gary B. Quakers and Politics: Pennsylvania 1681-1726. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1968. Places the antislavery cause within the larger framework of troubled politics in colonial Pennsylvania. Soderlund, Jean R. Quakers and Slavery: A Divided Spirit. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1985. A study of the Philadelphia Yearly Meeting and its progression to an antislavery philosophy. Draws parallels with the Civil Rights movement of the 1960’s. See also Black codes; Free African Society; Freemasons in Boston; National Council of Colored People

Plessy v. Ferguson The Case: Landmark U.S. Supreme Court ruling on segregation Date: May 18, 1896 The Supreme Court’s decision in Plessy v. Ferguson upheld government-imposed segregation as constitutional and established the notorious separate but equal doctrine that would eventually be used to overturn segregation. On July 10, 1890, the Louisiana General Assembly, over the objection of its eighteen African American members, enacted a law which read, in part:

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all railway companies carrying passengers in their coaches in this state shall provide equal but separate accommodations for the white and colored races, by providing two or more passenger coaches for each passenger train, or by dividing the passenger coaches by a partition so as to secure separate accommodations.

The law empowered train officials to assign passengers to cars; passengers insisting on going into a car set aside for the other race were liable to a twenty-five-dollar fine and twenty days’ imprisonment. In addition, the company could refuse to carry an obstreperous passenger and, if it were sued for doing so, was immune from damages in state courts. A third section outlined the penalties for noncomplying railroads and provided that “nothing in this act shall be construed as applying to nurses attending children of the other race.” Opposition to the Law The prominent black community of New Orleans organized to mount a legal attack on the new law. A group calling itself the Citizens’ Committee to Test the Constitutionality of the Separate Car Law, led by Louis Martinet and Alexander A. Mary, organized to handle the litigation and enlisted the services of Albion W. Tourgée. Tourgée was to serve as chief counsel and devote his considerable talents to rallying public opposition to the Jim Crow system typified by the Louisiana law. Martinet engaged James Walker to assist in handling the Louisiana phase of the controversy. Before the first test of the Louisiana law (also featuring an African American who could “pass for white”) could be settled, the Louisiana Supreme Court decided that the 1890 law could not be applied to interstate travelers since it was an unconstitutional regulation of interstate commerce (State ex rel. Abbot v. Hicks, 11 So. 74 in 1892). The Plessy case, then, relitigated the question raised in the 1890 Mississippi railroad case, but as a problem in the constitutional law of civil liberties rather than one of interstate commerce. Homer Plessy The person recruited to test the segregation law was Homer Adolph Plessy, a man of seven-eighths European and one-eighth

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African ancestry. According to contemporary accounts, he was a person in whom “the mixture of colored blood was not discernible.” On June 7, 1892, Plessy purchased a first-class ticket entitling him to travel on the East Louisiana Railway from New Orleans to Covington, Louisiana. After Plessy took a seat in a car reserved for whites, he told the conductor that he was one-eighth Negro. The train’s conductor, assisted by a policeman, then forcibly removed him. Charging Plessy with violating the segregation law, the police placed him in a parish jail. The state prosecuted Plessy in the Orleans Parish criminal district court before Judge John H. Ferguson. Plessy’s plea that the law was unconstitutional was overruled by Ferguson, who directed the defense to address itself to the questions of fact. Having no defense in the facts, Tourgée and Walker appealed Ferguson’s ruling on the law’s constitutionality to the Louisiana Supreme Court by asking that court to issue a writ of prohibition which in effect would have directed Ferguson to reverse his ruling on the constitutional question. On December 19, 1892, Associate Judge Charles E. Fenner of the Louisiana Supreme Court ruled the law constitutional in an opinion which served as a model for that written later by Justice Henry Billings Brown of the U.S. Supreme Court. After a delay of almost four years—a delay that Tourgée encouraged on the grounds that it gave the opponents of segregation needed time— the U.S. Supreme Court heard the arguments in Plessy’s case on April 13, 1896. On May 18, 1896, Justice Brown handed down the majority opinion, supported by six other justices (Justice David Brewer did not participate, and Justice John Marshall Harlan dissented). Justice Brown first disposed of Tourgée’s argument that the segregation law was a “badge of servitude,” a vestige of slavery prohibited by the Thirteenth Amendment (1865). Decisions in 1873 (Slaughterhouse cases) and 1883 (Civil Rights cases), wrote Brown, indicated that it was because the Thirteenth Amendment barred only outright slavery and not laws merely imposing “onerous disabilities and burdens” that the movement for the Fourteenth Amendment was successful.

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Brown in his opinion delivered a famous statement on the relationship between law, prejudice, and equality: The [plaintiff’s] argument also assumes that social prejudice may be overcome by legislation, and that equal rights cannot be secured to the negro except by an enforced commingling of the two races. We cannot accept this proposition. If the two races are to meet on terms of social equality, it must be the result of natural affinities, a mutual appreciation of each other’s merits and a voluntary consent of individuals.

The law in question, however, specifically interfered with the “voluntary consent of individuals.” Effects of the Decision The Court thus sanctioned Jim Crowism. What comfort African Americans derived from the case had to be found in the strong dissenting opinion of Justice Harlan, who once again proved himself to be a staunch champion of a broad interpretation of the Reconstruction amendments. Harlan construed the ban on slavery to cover segregation laws; he insisted on Tourgée’s thesis that a railroad was a public highway and that under the Fourteenth Amendment government could make no racial distinctions whether one considered the case under the privileges and immunities, due process, or equal protection clauses of that amendment. Harlan attacked the Court’s reliance on preFourteenth Amendment precedents; his most memorable language appeared in connection with his charge that the majority usurped constitutional power by assuming authority to decide on the “reasonableness” of state social legislation: The white race deems itself to be the dominant race in this country. And so it is, in prestige, in achievements, in education, in wealth, and in power. So, I doubt not that it will continue to be for all time, if it remains true to its great heritage and holds fast to the principles of constitutional liberty. But in view of the Constitution, in the eye of the law, there is in this country no superior, dominant, ruling class of citizens. There is no caste here. Our Constitution is color-blind, and neither knows nor tolerates classes among citizens. In respect of civil rights, all citizens are equal before the law.

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Harlan turned out to be a competent soothsayer: The destinies of the two races in this country are indissolubly linked together, and the interests of both require that the common government of all shall not permit the seeds of race hate to be planted under the sanction of law.

It would, however, take the general public and the justices of the Supreme Court decades to adopt Harlan’s views and interpretation of the Constitution. Plessy’s strong sanction of segregation in transportation lasted formally until 1950 (Henderson v. United States) and in education until 1954 (Brown v. Board of Education). Antimiscegenation laws were not outlawed until 1967 (Loving v. Virginia). James J. Bolner Updated by Brian L. Fife Further Reading Jerrold M. Packard’s American Nightmare: The History of Jim Crow (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2002) provides a detailed examination of the Plessy case. Paul G. Kauper’s “Segregation in Public Education: The Decline of Plessy v. Ferguson” (Michigan Law Review 52, 1954) contends that the Court did not deal definitively with the validity of segregation legislation, relying instead on its view of “reasonableness.” Charles A. Lofgren’s The Plessy Case: A Legal-Historical Interpretation (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987) concludes that Plessy did not cause Jim Crow but instead confirmed the American racism of its era. John P. Roche’s “Plessy v. Ferguson: Requiescat in Pace?” (University of Pennsylvania Law Review 103, 1954) asserts that the Plessy decision reflected the political climate of its time and was a judicial attempt to deal with a social and political problem. C. Vann Woodward’s American Counterpoint: Slavery and Racism in the North-South Dialogue (Boston: Little, Brown, 1971) discusses the irony of Justices Brown’s and Harlan’s positions in the light of the origins of the two men. See also Black codes; Brown v. Board of Education; Civil Rights cases; Cooper v. Aaron; Cumming v. Richmond County Board of Edu-

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cation; Disfranchisement laws in Mississippi; Jim Crow laws; One-drop rule; Segregation; Separate but equal doctrine; Sweatt v. Painter; Universal Negro Improvement Association

Politics and government African Americans have occupied a central place in American politics since the founding of the United States, when the issue of how slaves should be counted for purposes of political representation influenced the writing of the U.S. Constitution. Throughout the first half of the nineteenth century, slavery was one of the most bitter and divisive political questions in the nation. Most historians agree that the enslavement of African Americans was the fundamental cause of the American Civil War. Throughout the twentieth century, race shaped American politics. Despite the importance of African Americans to political life in the United States, throughout much of the nation’s existence, African Americans were allowed to participate very little in elections or other types of formal political activities. During the nineteenth century, widespread African American political activity largely began and ended with the brief historical period known as Reconstruction. After that, black involvement in electoral politics only began to flourish again in the late twentieth century. Political Representation When representatives of the new independent United States held a Constitutional Convention in 1787 to devise a basic framework for American government, nearly one-fifth of the people living in the new nation were held in slavery. Their status was one of the fundamental political issues at the convention. A number of the signers of the Constitution were opposed to slavery. However, many representatives, especially from the South, would not have accepted a Constitution that did not tacitly accept the institution of slavery. Therefore, in order to gain acceptance for this political charter, even the Framers of the Constitution who were

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against holding humans in bondage agreed to compromise and recognize the institution. Northerners and southerners, whether they opposed or favored the continuation of slavery, tended to disagree on how slaves should be counted for purposes of political representation in the House of Representatives, who were to be apportioned according to the numbers of people living in each state. If slaves in the southern states were counted as part of those states’ populations, white voters in those states would be able to elect more representatives than similar numbers of voters in other states. Northerners at the Convention therefore argued that slaves should not be counted for purposes of representation, but should be regarded in the same way as any other form of property. The enumeration clause of the Constitution was a compromise between these two conflicting sets of interests. The members of the Constitutional Convention agreed that every five slaves— referred to as “other persons” in the Constitution—would be counted as three persons for purposes of calculating political representation. This agreement became known as the three-fifths compromise. Thus, during the remaining years of slavery, the slaves who made up the overwhelming majority of African Americans were counted in political representation, even though they were unable to elect their own representatives. Active participation in U.S. politics on the part of African Americans only began in earnest after the abolition of slavery, during the Reconstruction era. Reconstruction At the end of the Civil War in 1865, the Republican Party controlled both the U.S. Senate and the House of Representatives. Members of the party were divided between moderates and radicals. Moderates supported the abolition of slavery but opposed bringing African Americans in the South into full participation in the political system. Radicals favored full citizenship and political rights for all African Americans. Andrew Johnson became president of the United States after the assassination of Abraham Lincoln in April, 1865. As presi-

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These Mississippi political figures represent a generation of African American elected officials in the South whose careers were made possible by Reconstruction. (Library of Congress)

dent, he appointed provisional governors for each of the states of the defeated Confederacy. These governors held constitutional conventions that would outlaw slavery and bring their states back into the Union. The new state governments in the South accepted Johnson’s plan. They also acted to limit the political and personal freedom of newly freed African Americans. White residents of the southern states attempted to control their freed slaves and force them to continue doing plantation-type labor through laws known as black codes. Many people in the victorious North were angry with President Johnson, who seemed to be giving too many concessions to

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the defeated South and too little support to the former slaves. The U.S. Congress responded by refusing to recognize the new governments of the southern states and by rejecting elected representatives to Congress from those states. Congress created a Joint Committee on Reconstruction, replacing presidential Reconstruction with Radical Reconstruction. To help the freed slaves, Congress established the Freedmen’s Bureau in 1865. The following year, Congress passed the first federal civil rights act, which was designed to protect the rights of African Americans in the South by outlawing the black codes. Under Reconstruction, African Americans began to win election to offices in the new southern state governments and, for the first time, to take part in representative politics. The Military Reconstruction Acts of 1867 required that all of the southern states adopt constitutions guaranteeing African American men the right to vote. After the ratification of the Fifteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, Congress passed the Enforcement Act in 1870, guaranteeing the right to vote to all male citizens, regardless of whether they had previously been slaves, and imposing penalties for interfering with the right to vote. In many parts of the South, branches of the Union League helped to bring African Americans into the political process. Originally founded in Ohio in 1862 to counter pro-Confederate groups in the North, Union League associations moved south in the wake of the Union army to register African American voters and mobilize their support for the Republican Party. Black political participation grew rapidly during the late 1860’s and the 1870’s. After passage of the Military Reconstruction Acts, an estimated 700,000 African Americans registered to vote. By 1872, 324 African American representatives were serving in state legislatures and Congress in the eleven former Confederate states. During the first half of the 1870’s, South Carolina had eighty-seven African Americans in its legislature, and only forty whites. The state of Louisiana elected 133 African Americans to its state legislature during the years following the Civil War. Six black lieutenant governors served in southern states during these years. One of these, P. B. S. Pinchback, briefly served as governor of Louisiana, from December, 1872, to January, 1873, after the suc-

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cessful impeachment of Louisiana’s northern-born white governor, Henry Clay Warmoth. The Reconstruction period saw the election of the first African Americans to serve in the U.S. Senate. Hiram R. Revels was born free in North Carolina, served in a black regiment in the Union army, and arrived in Mississippi in 1865. He was chosen by the Mississippi legislature to finish that state’s term in the Senate, from February, 1870, to March, 1871. Blanche K. Bruce, who spent his childhood as a slave in Virginia, held a variety of local offices in Mississippi before being elected as that state’s senator. Holding office from 1875 to 1881, Bruce was the first African American to serve a full term in the U.S. Senate. During the early 1870’s, white southerners who were opposed to Reconstruction governments and to black political participation joined together to support the Democratic Party. Terrorist organizations, such as the Ku Klux Klan, helped to keep African Americans away from the polls. Lacking land or means to support themselves, African Americans in the South were economically dependent on white employers and landowners. With support from the North weakening, African Americans were unable to maintain their political power in the South. The End of Reconstruction In 1877, newly elected President Rutherford B. Hayes withdrew all remaining federal troops from the southern states, thereby ending Reconstruction. Throughout the South, “redeemer” governments, which sought to return white control, took power. The Ku Klux Klan and other terrorist organizations helped by keeping black voters away from the polls. South Carolina elected Wade Hampton as its “redeemer” governor, and Hampton’s government became an example for other southern states. Hampton was committed to the idea of paternalism, of restricting political participation to “qualified” African Americans who would accept the position of their race in southern society. This type of paternalism was followed by state voting laws that attempted to remove African Americans from voting lists altogether. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries,

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literacy tests were established as Elected African means of denying the vote to AfAmerican Officials, rican Americans in Mississippi 1970-2001 (1890), South Carolina (1895), Louisiana (1898), North CaroYear Officials lina (1900), Arkansas (1901), Vir1970 1,469 ginia (1902), and Georgia (1908). Poll taxes were enacted in all 1980 4,890 the former Confederate states. 1990 7,335 This type of legislation also of1995 8,385 ten had the effect of limiting par1998 8,830 ticipation by poorer whites. Mis1999 8,896 sissippi, for example, cut back 2000 9,001 the total number of voters in the 2001 9,061 state by about 70 percent between the end of Reconstruction Source: Statistical Abstract of the and the early 1890’s. In 1897, United States, 2004. Louisiana had 130,000 registered black voters and 164,000 registered white voters. By 1904, just over 1,000 registered Louisianian voters were black, and 92,000 were white. The Twentieth Century Throughout the first half of the twentieth century, African Americans were generally shut out of electoral politics, especially in the South, where the majority of African Americans lived. As African Americans began to move out of the South in the early part of the century, they did achieve some representation. In Chicago, a large African American residential area emerged. Working with the city’s Republican political machine, Oscar DePriest won election to the Chicago city council in 1915, and then to the U.S. House of Representatives in 1928. Able to build their own political organization during the 1930’s, Chicago’s African Americans sent Arthur W. Mitchell to the House of Representatives in 1934 and William L. Dawson in 1942. During the 1920’s and 1930’s, those African Americans who could participate in politics began to shift their allegiance from the Republican to the Democratic Party. Northern Democrats

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sought to compete against the dominant Republicans by actively seeking African American votes. When the 1924 Democratic presidential candidate John Davis stated that he would not make distinctions among Americans on the basis of race, creed, or color, this made the national Democratic Party appear to be the party of racial equality, even though southern Democrats still promoted segregation and discrimination. The election of President Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1932 solidified African American support for the Democratic Party. Even though Roosevelt’s New Deal primarily benefited whites, African Americans gained from it. In addition, President Roosevelt appointed African Americans as federal officials, particularly in positions relating to racial matters. By the end of Roosevelt’s first term, most African Americans with party identifications had become Democrats. In 1936, when Roosevelt was nominated by his party for a second time, African American delegates attended the Democratic National Convention for the first time. The first African American congressman from the Democratic Party, Arthur Mitchell, gave the convention’s welcoming address. Civil Rights and the “Dixiecrats” During World War II, African Americans began to call for new attention to civil rights. In 1941, civil rights leader A. Philip Randolph called for a March on Washington to demand jobs and an end to segregation and discrimination in government programs. President Roosevelt responded by issuing Executive Order 8802, providing for some attempts at lessening discrimination in employment in defense industries. After World War II, limited governmental support for civil rights led to the rise of a new political party based in the South. President Harry S. Truman showed some support for racial equality, and the Truman administration allowed the Justice Department to provide support for school desegregation in important court cases. In 1947, Truman appointed the President’s Committee for Civil Rights to study ways of improving the lives of African Americans. The following year, under pressure from civil rights activists, Truman issued Executive Order 9981, which substantially desegregated the military.

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President Truman’s mild advocacy of civil rights angered many white southern voters and southern politicians. Three days after the Democratic Party nominated Truman for another term in 1948, delegates from the southern states met in Birmingham, Alabama, to organize the States’ Rights Party, which is better known as the Dixiecrat Party. Racial segregation was a basic part of its platform. The Dixiecrats nominated Governor (later Senator) Strom Thurmond of South Carolina as their presidential candidate and Governor Fielding Wright of Mississippi as their candidate for vice president. Although Truman won the national election, Thurmond won four states, illustrating the continuing role of race as a central issue in American politics. The Civil Rights Movement and American Politics Protection for the right to vote was one of the fundamental demands of the Civil Rights movement in the 1950’s and 1960’s. In a number of states, particularly in the South, African Americans were still being prevented from voting at the middle of the century. Under the administration of President Dwight D. Eisenhower, the U.S. Congress passed the Civil Rights Act of 1957, its first civil rights legislation since Reconstruction. The new legislation enabled the federal government to sue whenever an individual was denied the right to vote. It also created the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, which investigated the situation of African American voters. During the 1960’s, federal government support for the political rights of African Americans grew. In southern states, civil rights organizations were organizing African American voters and the publicity generated by their efforts spurred President John F. Kennedy to propose a new civil rights bill in 1963. The following year, the Civil Rights Act of 1964 passed under the administration of President Lyndon B. Johnson. This was followed by the Voting Rights Act of 1965, which abolished poll taxes and other strategies for discrimination in voting. It also gave the federal government the power to send federal registrars into any counties where there had been evidence of voting discrimination. Together, the two acts of 1964 and 1965 helped to bring African Americans throughout the nation into electoral politics.

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The Rise of Black Elected Officials In the late 1960’s and early 1970’s, the numbers of African American voters increased rapidly. The Civil Rights movement had drawn attention to the importance of political activity, and the acts of 1964 and 1965 had removed many of the barriers these voters faced in earlier decades. The growth of African American voters led to a rapid increase in African American elected officials. In 1970, there were fewer than 1,500 African Americans in elected public offices throughout the United States. Just ten years later, this figure had grown to close to 5,000 officials. By 1990, the number had grown to exceed 7,000. As African Americans began taking a greater part in the electoral politics of the United States, they created new political associations. Thirteen African American members of the House of Representatives joined together to form the Congressional Black Caucus in 1969. They believed that the organization would help them achieve the unity needed to affect national policy. In 1971, the members of the Black Caucus met with President Richard M. Nixon and presented him with a list of sixty recommendations on domestic and foreign policy issues. In the same year that the congressional Black Caucus was founded, Shirley Chisholm, a former New York state legislator, became the first black woman to enter the House of Representatives. Chisholm went on to campaign for the Democratic presidential nomination in 1972. Most of the increase in African American elected officials occurred at local and state levels. A number of cities with large African American populations elected African American mayors. Carl B. Stokes, an Ohio state legislator, was elected mayor of Cleveland in 1967 and 1969. In 1972, thirteen recently elected black mayors met in Fayette, Mississippi, and formed the National Council of Black Mayors. The following year, fifteen mayors met in Tuskegee, Alabama, and created the Southern Conference of Black Mayors. In 1976, at its second annual meeting in Atlanta, Georgia, that body changed its name to National Conference of Black Mayors. In 1977, African American officials at the state level throughout the United States formed the National Black Caucus of State Legislators, with headquarters in Washing-

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ton, D.C., to offer support to black officials and to help them communicate with each other. Twenty-First Century African American Politics By the year 2001, 24.1 million African Americans were part of the voting-age population of the United States; they represented 11.9 percent of the total voting-age population. However, African Americans were still vastly underrepresented in the political system. A December, 2000, study conducted by the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies showed that at the end of the twentieth century, African Americans held only 1.7 percent of all public elected offices. Nevertheless, the number of African Americans who did hold public offices was six times greater than it had been in 1970. States with the most elected African American elected officials in 2001 were Mississippi (892 officials), Alabama (756), Louisiana (705), Illinois (624), and Georgia (611). Only Hawaii, Montana, North Dakota, and South Dakota had no elected officials who were identified as African American in 2001. The link between African Americans and the Democratic Party, first forged during the 1920’s and 1930’s, continued into the twenty first century. The connection between race and political affiliation became an especially heated question in the 2000 presidential election, when Democratic nominee Al Gore narrowly lost the election to Republican George W. Bush as a result of the delayed vote count in Florida. Problems with ballots led some observers to maintain that many African American votes had not been counted, possibly costing the Democrats the national election. In the 2002 General Social Survey conducted by the National Opinion Research Center, 71 percent of African American potential voters identified themselves as Democrats and 21 percent as independents, with only 8 percent as Republicans. By comparison, 41 percent of whites identified themselves as Republicans, 38 percent as Democrats, 19 percent as independents, and 2 percent as members of other parties. Carl L. Bankston III

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Further Reading Coburn, David R., and Jeffrey S. Adler. African-American Mayors: Race, Politics, and the American City. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2001. Excellent source on African Americans in local politics; includes profiles of African American mayors and a historical perspective on the challenges they have faced. Foner, Eric, Reconstruction: America’s Unfinished Revolution, 18631877. New York: Harper & Row, 1988. One of the best books on all aspects of Reconstruction, including its politics. Hahn, Steven. A Nation Under Our Feet: Black Political Struggles in the Rural South from Slavery to the Great Migration. Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press, 2005. Examination of how political traditions that emerged out of slavery produced the foundations of modern African American politics. Reuter, Ted, ed. The Politics of Race: African Americans and the Political System. New York: M. E. Sharpe, 1995. Collection of writings by academics, journalists, and public officials on a wide variety of topics in African American politics. See also Black cabinet; Chisholm’s election to Congress; Compromise of 1877; Congressional Black Caucus; Gerrymandering; Grandfather clauses; Jackson’s run for the presidency; Lassiter v. Northampton County Board of Elections; President’s Committee on Civil Rights; Thomas-Hill hearings; Three-fifths compromise; Twenty-fourth Amendment; Voting Rights Act of 1965; Voting Rights Act of 1975; White primaries; Wilder’s election to Virginia governorship

Poll taxes Definition: Fees citizens had to pay in order to vote Although poll taxes were assessed equally among all voters, they were instituted in many southern states for the purpose of discouraging African Americans and many poor whites from voting until they were outlawed. Poll taxes originated after the American Revolution in order to expand, not restrict, the electorate. Since only white, male,

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property holders could vote in the post-revolutionary period, the poll tax payment became a substitute for property requirements. It was not until after the Civil War that southern states used the poll tax to restrict the electorate. Florida was the first state to adopt a poll tax, in 1889, and other southern states quickly followed. Most states imposed a tax of between one and two dollars, and the tax was cumulative. A person had to pay the tax every year, not only the year the person wanted to vote. In Alabama the tax could accumulate for as long as twenty-four years. Many states gave exemptions for the aged and people with disabilities and for veterans. The veterans’ exemption angered many women, once women gained the vote, as women were prohibited by law from serving in the military and therefore had to pay the tax. As a result, many women led the opposition to the poll tax. Another unique feature of the poll tax was that the tax frequently had to be paid six months to a year before the election. If one forgot to pay, one could not vote. Most states also required people to keep poll tax receipts. Those African Americans and poor whites who could pay the tax had to retain receipts for several years to prove they had paid it. Poll taxes successfully eliminated most black voters and many whites as well. The taxes also led to political corruption, as candidates, political organizations, and interest groups would pay the taxes of their supporters even though this was illegal. The corrupting influence of the poll tax led a number of states to seek its repeal. Many national organizations, including the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) and the National Committee to Abolish the Poll Tax, sought to eliminate the tax. One approach was the attempt to get Congress to ban poll taxes in federal elections. On five occasions the House of Representatives passed legislation to repeal the poll tax, and each time it was killed by southern-led filibusters in the Senate. Another approach to banning the poll tax was by constitutional amendment. In 1964, the Twenty-fourth Amendment was adopted, which banned poll taxes in federal elections. Poll taxes

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were still permitted in state and local elections until 1966, when the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that poll taxes violated the equal protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment in Harper v. Virginia Board of Elections. See also Fifteenth Amendment; Grandfather clauses; Harper v. Virginia Board of Elections; Jim Crow laws; Newberry v. United States; Twenty-fourth Amendment; United States v. Reese; Voting Rights Act of 1965; White primaries

Poor People’s March on Washington The Event: Unsuccessful attempt to broaden the Civil Rights movement into a nonracial national campaign to reduce poverty Date: April 28-May 13, 1968 Place: Washington, D.C. The failure of the Poor People’s March on Washington reflected the public’s lack of interest in the complex problem of economic injustice and the difficulty of solving such a problem. In 1967, after passage of federal laws designed to end racial segregation and disfranchisement of African American voters, including the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and Voting Rights Act of 1965, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) decided that federal legislation was needed to address joblessness and homelessness. Background to the March To draw attention to the problems of poor Americans and push Congress to pass laws to expand employment and lowincome housing opportunities, the SCLC developed plans for a nonviolent march to Washington, D.C., in the spring of 1968. The march would be followed by the construction of Resurrection City, a temporary community for poor people, on federal property in Washington. The SCLC hoped that these actions, labeled the Poor People’s Campaign, would unify impoverished people

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of various ethnic and racial backgrounds. Although Martin Luther King, Jr., strongly supported the campaign, others in SCLC were critical of it and argued that Congress was unlikely to respond to the protesters. Public support for marches had faded considerably since 1965, partly because people believed that protest marches tended to provoke urban rioting. On April 4, 1968, with the march just weeks away, King was assassinated in Memphis, Tennessee. Although his death represented a tremendous loss to SCLC and march organizers were in mourning, plans for the Poor People’s Campaign continued. Ralph Abernathy, King’s successor as leader of the SCLC, became spokesperson for the march. On April 28, groups of poor people left their communities to travel to Washington, D.C. Although some southern participants actually walked from town to town en route to Washington, others from the North, Midwest, and West Coast traveled by bus toward the nation’s capitol. Marchers made designated stops during their journeys to hold rallies and recruit additional participants. Marchers Converge on Washington, D.C. Marchers began to arrive in Washington on May 11, and on May 13, the Poor People’s March officially marked its end with Ab-

Tents erected in “Resurrection City” in May, 1968. (Library of Congress)

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ernathy driving a construction stake into the grounds of a fifteenacre section of West Potomac Park that became Resurrection City, where the marchers would live during the next phase of the campaign. The demonstrators erected wooden shacks and tents designed to draw the government’s attention to the plight of poor people. On June 24, police moved in with tear gas and razed the buildings. Abernathy and a group of followers held a march in protest of the destruction of Resurrection City and were arrested. The Poor People’s March drew media attention to SCLC’s decision to focus national attention on the need for federal legislation to address the problems of people living in poverty. However, neither the public nor Congress responded with support for new programs for the poor. The failure of the Poor People’s Campaign reflected the loss of King’s leadership and a shift in public attention from problems of racism and poverty to the war in Vietnam and the 1968 presidential campaign. Beth Kraig Further Reading Charles Fager, who observed the march, wrote about it and the Poor People’s Campaign in Uncertain Resurrection: The Poor People’s Washington Campaign (1969). “The Promised Land” in the Public Broadcasting System’s Eyes on the Prize video series contains footage of the march and interviews with participants. See also Birmingham March; Chisholm’s election to Congress; Economic trends; Million Man March; Million Woman March; Selma-Montgomery march; Southern Christian Leadership Conference

Powell v. Alabama The Case: U.S. Supreme Court ruling on the right to counsel Date: November 7, 1932 In this, the first of the Scottsboro cases, the Supreme Court overturned the death sentences of the seven African Americans unjustly convicted of rape.

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Near Scottsboro, Alabama, nine young African American men were tried on charges of raping two white women on a freight train in 1931. Eight were convicted and sentenced to death. Alabama’s highest court upheld the convictions of seven of the young men. The Scottsboro cases were then appealed to the Supreme Court. Justice George Sutherland wrote the opinion of the 7-2 majority, overturning the conviction and death sentence of the Scottsboro boys for rape. Sutherland held that the Fourteenth Amendment’s due process clause mandated a fair trial, which required the effective assistance of legal counsel in capital cases. Because the Fourteenth Amendment applied to the states, the Alabama conviction could not stand. Justice Pierce Butler dissented and was joined by James C. McReynolds, arguing that the defendants had had effective representation and that the Court was making an unnecessary intrusion into the functioning of state courts. Richard L. Wilson See also Fourteenth Amendment; Norris v. Alabama

Powers v. Ohio The Case: U.S. Supreme Court ruling on race discrimination and jury composition Date: April 1, 1991 The Supreme Court held that prosecutors cannot use peremptory challenges to exclude African Americans from juries in criminal trials. Justice Anthony M. Kennedy wrote the opinion for the 7-2 majority, holding that prosecutors cannot attempt to pack the jury with jurors racially satisfactory to themselves by using peremptory challenges in jury selection in criminal cases. Kennedy held that this was true even if the accused and the excluded juror were of the same race. The past practice of allowing the use of peremptory challenges affected not only the defendant’s right to a fair trial but also the excluded juror’s right to participate in the administration of justice. The defendant further was entitled to raise

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the excluded juror’s right at trial. Dissenting, Justice Antonin Scalia argued that this decision was illogical, freeing a guilty defendant based on the fact that some other person’s abstract right to participate in the judicial process was denied. Richard L. Wilson See also Batson v. Kentucky; Edmonson v. Leesville Concrete Company; Moore v. Dempsey; Norris v. Alabama; Strauder v. West Virginia; Williams v. Mississippi

President’s Committee on Civil Rights Identification: Government commission appointed by President Harry S. Truman to investigate the condition of African American civil rights and make recommendations for government action Date: Created on December 5, 1946 The report issued by the committee was a bold and unprecedented step for the federal government to take in the field of civil rights. It led to little immediate action but would later help to bring the need for civil rights reform to the attention of the nation as a whole. Like many white southerners of his time, U.S. president Harry S. Truman inherited the racial attitudes of his ancestors. He attended segregated schools in Missouri and regarded segregation as normal and desirable. He used what people today consider offensive racial language and once claimed that African Americans belonged in Africa, not America. Yet when he became president in 1945, Truman rose above his racist heritage and responded to African American demands. As a successful politician, he had learned to work with African American political groups and to understand the necessity of serving all of his constituents. He disliked social mixing among people of different races, but he believed that African American people had the right to equality under the law and deserved equal opportunity.

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At the end of World War II, racial tension rose as African Americans tried to cement economic and social gains they had made during the war. Racial violence increased. For example, in February, 1946, a South Carolina policeman blinded an African American veteran still in uniform, and in July, two more veterans were killed in Monroe, Georgia. In addition to domestic racial problems, the Cold War was beginning to destroy the wartime alliance between the United States and the Soviet Union. The two superpowers began to divide spheres of influence between them and to compete for the allegiance of Asian and African peoples. Truman, recognizing the negative image presented by American segregation, said, “The top dog in a world which is 90 percent colored ought to clean his own house.” On December 5, 1946, Truman issued Executive Order 9008 to create the President’s Committee on Civil Rights and filled the fifteen-member committee with prominent Americans who were sympathetic to civil rights. It was a high-profile committee that included important businessmen, educators, labor leaders, and members of the African American community. On October 29, 1947, in a document entitled To Secure These Rights, the committee recommended establishment of a civil rights division in the Department of Justice, a commission on civil rights, and a fair employment practices committee. The committe’s report urged Congress to strengthen existing civil rights statutes, pass an antilynching law, and provide new protection for voting rights. To move toward desegregation, the committee said, the government must discontinue federal funding to private and public bodies that practiced discrimination, prohibit discrimination in private employment and in health services, and seek court action to end restrictive covenants in housing. These recommendations established the civil rights platform for Truman and his successors. In 1948, Truman issued Executive Order 9980 to forbid discrimination in federal government employment and Executive Order 9981 to integrate the armed forces. Under Truman’s direction, the Justice Department entered amici curiae briefs in court cases to back the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) and others in their assaults on the legal edifice that supported segregation. It

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took many years before the vision expressed in To Secure These Rights started to become reality, but the report moved civil rights to the forefront of the national reform agenda. William E. Pemberton See also Defense industry desegregation; Military desegregation; Politics and government; Race riots of 1943

Proslavery argument Definition: Southern rationales for the institution of slavery Before the Civil War, the proslavery argument served as an intellectual bond among southerners who saw slavery as a moral institution. In the quarter-century preceding the Civil War, southerners advanced a wide range of arguments and theories—some old, some new—to justify the institution of chattel slavery. The distinctiveness of proslavery thinking during the years before the Civil War lay less in its content than in its tone or spirit. Defenders of the South’s “peculiar institution” were no longer on the defensive; their mood was no longer apologetic. Unlike most of their predecessors, they did not merely tolerate slavery; they defined it as a moral institution and many glorified it. They took the offensive on behalf of slavery partly in response to the attacks of northern abolitionists. Perhaps the primary objective of their aggressive proslavery campaign was to dispel the doubts of southerners as to the justice of slavery and to offer compelling proof to nonslaveholders and slaveholders alike that slavery found sanction in religion, science, and morality, forming an essential part of a civilized economic and political order. Post-1830 proslavery discourse borrowed from a variety of sources, many of which had been used before immediate abolitionism posed a new threat to slavery. Proslavery apologists pointed to the existence of slavery in biblical times and throughout most of history, as well as to the notion of entailment, which blamed the introduction of slavery on the British and predicted social catastrophe should slavery be abolished. These arguments

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continued to dominate the thinking of most proslavery writers in the 1830’s, as evidenced, for example, in Thomas R. Dew’s Review of the Debate in the Virginia Legislature of 1831 and 1832. Although this was once treated as the first work of the new proslavery discourse, later historians have seen it as the culmination of the earlier, less affirmative phase of proslavery writing in the South. Dew’s work, which was widely read, asserted that slavery was a preferred way of compelling efficient labor in the hot states of the lower South, the harbinger of the notions of perpetual slavery developed by later southern apologists. The Response to Garrison Traditionally, historians have understood post-1830 proslavery as a reaction to the publication of William Lloyd Garrison’s journal The Liberator (1831-1865), which marks the onset of immediate abolitionism, and the fear spawned by Nat Turner’s slave rebellion in Southampton County, Virginia. Both events occurred in 1831, but other issues intensified proslavery writing and abolitionist discourse during the 1830’s. Proslavery polemics seem to have escalated along a continuum, rather than suddenly appearing after 1831. Two interrelated themes characterized this escalation of southern proslavery.

Contemporary drawing of a pre-Civil War debate over slavery in the U.S. Congress. (Library of Congress)

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The first was a reaction to the abolitionist mail campaign of 1835, in which northern abolitionists attempted to flood the South with literature arguing that slavery was immoral. In response, southern ministers and denominations took the lead in denouncing the moral foundations of abolitionists. Virulent antiabolitionism became a major feature, perhaps the single constant, in southern proslavery. Southerners denounced abolitionism as incendiary, a wanton and dangerous interference with southern safety. southerners construed abolitionists as intent upon fomenting rebellion among southern slaves, and were also infuriated by the “Gag Rule” in Congress, which persuaded northerners that southerners would trample on the First Amendment or any other right to preserve slavery. The second theme involved a defense of slavery more ideological in tone, which blended biblical literalism with conservative social theories, some of which were quite popular among New England Federalists during the early nineteenth century. This strain of thinking challenged industrial economics and modern reform movements, asserting that a stratified social order produced the best society possible. A heavy lace of paternal imagery, which threaded together honor and social responsibility, gave ornamentation to this new proslavery fabric. In the hands of John C. Calhoun, this two-pronged argument proved that slavery was not an evil, as the abolitionists claimed, but “a good—a positive good,” “a great blessing to both races,” and “the great stay of the Union and our free institutions, and one of the main sources of the unbounded prosperity of the whole.” Typical of thinkers who championed this phase of proslavery writing was Thornton Stringfellow, a Baptist minister of Culpepper County, Virginia, whose Brief Examination of Scripture Testimony on the Institution of Slavery argued that slavery enjoyed “the sanction of the Almighty in the Patriarchal Age . . . that its legality was recognized . . . by Jesus Christ in his kingdom; and that it is full of mercy.” Godly southerners, Stringfellow maintained, should withdraw from abolitionists, whose moral notions must originate from some other source than the Bible. In a speech before the U.S. Senate in 1858, James Henry Hammond of South Carolina held that African American slaves pro-

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vided the “mud-sill” of society, whose labor was necessary but whose mean estate made essential their exclusion from the political process. Slavery was essential to free “that other class which leads progress, civilization and refinement” for more enlightened endeavors. Fortunately, the senator observed, the South had found African Americans perfectly adapted to serve as the “very mudsill of society and of political government,” “a race inferior to her own, but eminently qualified in temper, in vigor, in docility, in capacity to stand the climate, to answer all her purposes.” The Prewar Era During the 1850’s, other southern writers embraced more extreme proslavery theories, although these attracted more interest from historians in the twentieth century than from nineteenth century advocates. Henry Hughes, of Port Gibson, Mississippi, drew upon the infant discipline of sociology to buttress his proslavery views. He described slavery as “Ethical Warranteeism,” in which the slave labored for a master in return for food, clothing, and shelter. Josiah Nott, of Mobile, Alabama, embraced the theory of polygenesis, holding in Types of Mankind that African Americans resulted from a separate creation and were not Homo sapiens. Others compared southern slavery with free labor in the North. In Sociology of the South (1854) and Cannibals All! (1857), Virginian George Fitzhugh suggested that the northern states would have to adopt some form of slavery to control the immigrant working classes, or else face moral and social chaos. Free labor, he asserted, produced class warfare in the North, while slavery permitted social harmony in the South. Southern masters had moral obligations toward, and were predisposed to kind treatment of, their slaves; northern factory owners discarded their laborers at whim. Most southerners adhered to the less extreme argument based on the Bible and Plato. The proslavery argument became a justification for the entire southern way of life, whose culture, social structure, and economy were believed to depend upon the institution of slavery. Its ubiquity helped bind southerners together and produced the remarkable degree of unity among them in the days following the election of Abraham Lincoln in 1860 and his call for

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troops in April, 1861. Undoubtedly, the intensity and unanimity with which southerners defended slavery had much to do with the fact that they had come to identify the system of slavery with southern society as a whole and with their place in the Union. Anne C. Loveland Updated by Edward R. Crowther Further Reading William S. Jenkins’s Pro-Slavery Thought in the Old South (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1935), the oldest monograph on proslavery thinking, remains a useful starting point. Drew Glipin Faust’s The Ideology of Slavery: Proslavery Thought in the Antebellum South, 1830-1860 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1981) is an excellent anthology of proslavery writing augmented by a thoughtful introductory essay. William W. Freehling’s The Road to Disunion: Secessionists at Bay, 1776-1854 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990) shows the complex uses southerners made of proslavery thinking and why a degree of intellectual unity was vital in a South divided against itself. Larry E. Tise’s Proslavery: A History of the Defense of Slavery in America, 1701-1840 (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1987) shows that proslavery thinking existed in both northern and southern states. See also Abolition; Antislavery laws of 1777 and 1807; Bleeding Kansas; Civil War; Compromise of 1850; Fugitive Slave Law of 1793; Fugitive Slave Law of 1850; Kansas-Nebraska Act; Liberator, The; Missouri Compromise; Scott v. Sandford; Turner’s slave insurrection

R.A.V. v. City of St. Paul The Case: U.S. Supreme Court ruling on hate crime and free expression Date: June 22, 1992 This holding, invalidating an ordinance which made it a crime to burn a cross to harass African Americans, demonstrates how the Supreme Court affords a preferred status to First Amendment free speech, even reprehensible speech.

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During the early morning hours of June 21, 1990, “R.A.V.”—an unnamed seventeen-year-old, self-described as a white supremacist—and several other teenagers burned a makeshift wooden cross on the front lawn of the only African American family in their St. Paul, Minnesota, neighborhood. They were prosecuted for disorderly conduct in juvenile court under the city’s “biasmotivated crime ordinance,” which prohibited cross burning along with other symbolic displays that “one knows” or should know would arouse “anger, alarm or resentment in others on the basis of race, color, creed, religion, or gender.” The state trial court ruled that this ordinance was unconstitutionally overbroad because it indiscriminately prohibited protected First Amendment speech as well as unprotected activity. The Supreme Court of Minnesota reversed the lower court’s decision and upheld the ordinance, which it interpreted to prohibit only unprotected “fighting words,” face-to-face insults which are likely to cause the person to whom the words are addressed to attack the speaker physically. The U.S. Supreme Court ruled unanimously in favor of R.A.V. and invalidated the ordinance, but the justices did not agree in their reasoning. Stating that they found the cross burning reprehensible, Justice Antonin Scalia, writing for the majority, nevertheless concluded that the ordinance was unconstitutional because it criminalized only specified “fighting words” based on the content of the hate message and, consequently, the government was choosing sides. He noted that the ordinance would prohibit a sign that attacked Catholics but would not prohibit a second sign that attacked those who displayed such an anti-Catholic bias. Four justices concurred in the ruling of unconstitutionality, but Justice Byron White’s opinion sharply criticized the majority opinion for going too far to protect racist speech. He reasoned that the ordinance was overbroad because it made it a crime to cause another person offense, hurt feelings, or resentment and because these harms could be caused by protected First Amendment speech. Justices Harry Blackmun and John Paul Stevens also wrote separate opinions complaining that hate speech did not deserve constitutional protection.

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This holding calls into question numerous similar state laws designed to protect women and members of minorities from harassment and discrimination. Some of these individuals and groups may still invoke long-standing federal civil rights statutes, however, which carry severe criminal penalties of fines and imprisonment. In 1993, R.A.V.’s significance was called into question by the Wisconsin v. Mitchell decision upholding a state statute that increased a sentence for a crime of violence if the defendant targeted the victim because of the victim’s race or other specified status. See also Church bombings; Church burnings; Wisconsin v. Mitchell

Race riots of 1866 The Events: Civil disturbances in two southern cities in the aftermath of the Civil War Date: 1866 Places: Memphis, Tennessee; New Orleans, Louisiana Economic and social disparities between the races, along with a continuing military presence, led to violence during Reconstruction. Racial disturbances in Memphis and New Orleans in 1866 were the result of economic, social, and political issues that troubled the nation during Reconstruction. Given the upheaval in the lives of southerners after the Civil War, the racial disturbances are hardly surprising. In the simplest terms, one of the major tasks of Reconstruction was to assimilate the more than four million former slaves into U.S. society. A more complex view must consider the problems faced by the newly freed African Americans who had to achieve a new identity in a society that had allowed them no control over their own lives. White southerners had to live with the economic, social, and political consequences of defeat. The military occupation of the South by federal troops after the Civil War angered southern whites, who believed in their right to rebuild and rule their own society without interference from the North. The presence of fed-

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eral troops (many of them African Americans), an armed citizenry, and the psychological difficulty of accepting the end of the world they had known created explosive conditions that erupted into violence. The Black Codes The Memphis and New Orleans riots were one result of this upheaval. Soon after the surrender of the Confederate army at Appomattox in April, 1865, legislatures in the South acted to pass a series of black codes. These laws were intended to maintain control over the lives of the newly freed African Americans and, in effect, keep them enslaved. For example, harsh vagrancy laws allowed police to arrest black people without cause and force them to work for white employers. President Abraham Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation, on January 1, 1863, had freed—on paper—the slaves in the Confederate states. The U.S. Congress, having abolished slavery throughout the nation with the Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution in 1865, founded the Freedmen’s Bureau to assist the former slaves and was in the process of enacting, over the strong opposition of President Andrew Johnson, a series of Reconstruction Acts intended to repeal the South’s black codes. President Johnson resisted congressional attempts to admit African Americans to full citizenship, but Congress ultimately overrode his veto and took control of the Reconstruction program in the South. Many former slaves, rejecting the life they had known on the plantation, moved to the cities of the South. Most African Americans were refugees without any economic resources, competing with Irish and German immigrants for scarce jobs in the war-torn South. Southern white Protestants feared both the immigrants and the African Americans as threats to the social order. Memphis Conditions in Memphis were especially volatile in May, 1866. The city was a rowdy river town known for heavy drinking, gambling, prostitution, and fighting. In 1865, the black population of

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Memphis had increased to between twenty and twenty-five thousand, many of them living in a run-down district near Fort Pickering. The white citizens were alarmed by incendiary newspaper accounts of crime and disorder. The Memphis police, mostly Irish immigrants, were corrupt and ill trained and had a record of brutality toward black people. Added to this already explosive mixture was a body of federal troops, four thousand of whom were black soldiers stationed at Fort Pickering waiting to be mustered out of the army. The violence began on April 29, with a street confrontation between black soldiers and white policemen. On May 1, the violence escalated, with fights breaking out between groups of black soldiers and the city police. By May 2, the mob included a number of people from the surrounding countryside as well as white citizens of Memphis. The mob rampaged through the black district, attacking families, raping women, and burning homes. Civil authorities took no steps to curb the disturbance. After considerable delay, Major General George Stoneman, commanding the federal troops, brought the city under control. The three days of mob violence resulted in the deaths of forty-six African Americans and two white people. An estimated seventy to eighty other people were injured, and some ninety homes of black people, along with several African American churches and schools, were destroyed. Southern newspapers and civic officials blamed the black soldiers for the outbreak. A committee appointed by Congress, however, attributed the disturbances to the hatred of white people for the “colored race.” New Orleans Although the Memphis riots were the result of local conditions, the New Orleans disturbance of July 30 was caused by state politics and had national significance. Louisiana governor James Madison Wells, a Union sympathizer who needed to consolidate his power over the Confederates in New Orleans and the state, supported a plan to reassemble the state constitutional convention that had been disbanded in 1864. This convention, supported by Unionists, planned to gain votes by enfran-

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chising African Americans. The city, sympathetic to Confederate politics, was armed, and the corrupt police force had a record of false arrests and mistreatment of free African Americans. The local newspapers, using highly emotional language, incited the fear of white citizens that African Americans would gain political control. The commander of the federal troops, General Absalom Baird, should have foreseen the impending violence but apparently ignored the problem. When the delegates to the state convention began to assemble on July 30, fighting broke out between the city police and African American marchers supporting the right to vote. Delegates were dragged from the convention hall and assaulted by people in the street and by the police, who joined in the mob violence. The attacks on African Americans were savage; the wounded were dragged to the city jail and beaten, and the bodies of the dead were mistreated. As the violence escalated, fueled by the drunkenness of the mob, African Americans were dragged from their homes and beaten. The death toll in the one-day riot included 34 African Americans and 3 white people; approximately 136 people were injured. Although General Baird declared martial law, his action was too late. Several observers, including General Philip H. Sheridan, who was called in to restore order, described the mob violence as a “slaughter.” As in the case of the Memphis riots, nearly all the dead and injured were African Americans. Although the Memphis riots were caused by local conditions, the disturbances in New Orleans had state and national political consequences. The Republican Party lost power, paving the way for Democratic control of the state. Precedents for the racial violence that would mark the years of Reconstruction and beyond had been established. Marjorie Podolsky Further Reading Eric Foner’s “The Meaning of Freedom” and “The Making of Radical Reconstruction,” in Reconstruction: America’s Unfinished Revolution, 1863-1877 (New York: Harper & Row, 1988), interprets the scholarly history of Reconstruction and combines older views

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with newer scholarship. John Hope Franklin’s Reconstruction: After the Civil War (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1961) presents a revised view that rejects the carpetbagger stereotype and argues for a more positive representation of African Americans during Reconstruction. John Hope Franklin and Alfred A. Moss, Jr.’s “The Effort to Attain Peace,” in From Slavery to Freedom: A History of African Americans (7th ed., New York: McGraw-Hill, 1994), is a widely accepted record of the role of African Americans in U.S. history. Leon F. Litwack’s “How Free Is Free?” in Been in the Storm So Long: The Aftermath of Slavery (New York: Vintage Books, 1980), is based on the accounts of former slaves interviewed by the Federal Writers’ Project in the 1930’s. George C. Rable’s “The Memphis Race Riot” and “New Orleans and the Emergence of Political Violence,” in But There Was No Peace: The Role of Violence in the Politics of Reconstruction (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1984), uses contemporary newspaper articles to bring the riots to life and connect the disturbances with similar events in the twentieth century. Kenneth R. Stampp’s “The Tragic Legend of Reconstruction,” in The Era of Reconstruction, 1865-1877 (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1969), uses research on race from social scientists to counteract previous historians. See also Black codes; Civil Rights Acts of 1866-1875; Civil Rights cases; Clinton massacre; Draft riots; Emancipation Proclamation; Fourteenth Amendment; Freedmen’s Bureau; Gerrymandering; Ku Klux Klan; Race riots of 1943; Race riots of the twentieth century; Reconstruction; Thirteenth Amendment

Race riots of 1943 The Events: Racially motivated civil disturbances aggravated by wartime labor issues in several American cities Date: 1943 Places: Mobile, Alabama; Los Angeles, California; Beaumont, Texas; Detroit, Michigan; Harlem, New York Racial tensions peaked as whites and members of minorities competed for jobs and social services during World War II.

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The urban race riots in the summer of 1943 did not occur spontaneously. A pattern of violence throughout the nation, similar to the racial conflicts that occurred during World War I, had been escalating since 1940, as urban areas swelled with workers drawn to wartime industries. The lack of interracial communication, the failure of local, state, and federal agencies to comprehend the severity of the racial environment, challenges against established southern racial traditions, and extreme shortages of housing and social services created frustration, which manifested itself in racial violence. The Mobile Riots Tremendous growth in the population of Mobile, Alabama, caused severe problems in housing and city services. These shortages, combined with the competition for jobs, created racial tension. Whites jealously protected what they considered to be whiteonly, highpaying, skilled jobs. The largest wartime contractor in Mobile was ADDSCO, the Alabama Dry Dock and Shipbuilding Company. ADDSCO, like numerous other industries, employed African Americans only for unskilled or semiskilled positions. Unable to find enough skilled welders and to appease the local National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), led by John LeFlore and Burton R. Morley of the War Manpower Commission, ADDSCO agreed to employ African American welders. On May 24, 1943, black welders reported for work on the third shift at the Pinto Island Yard. No racial incidents occurred during the night, but the next morning, after additional black welders reported for work, violence erupted. Between five hundred and one thousand whites attacked black workers and drove them from the yards. Governor Chauncey Sparks ordered the Alabama State Guard to intervene, and by noon the rioting had ended. Federal troops occupied the shipyards, and local city and county government ordered all bars and liquor stores closed until the tension eased. Mobile police eventually charged three whites with felony assault, intent to murder, and inciting a riot. On June 5, 1943, the Alabama State Guard pulled out and on June 10, 1943, federal troops returned to their base at Brookley Field.

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Beaumont, Texas Around the same time, in California, similar violent rioting erupted between Mexican Americans and whites in Los Angeles in what became known as the “Zoot-suit riots.” As rioting in Los Angeles subsided, racial violence returned to the South. Beaumont, Texas, located between Houston and the Louisiana border, had experienced tremendous wartime growth because of its petroleum production facilities and shipbuilding operations. With emotions already frayed from an earlier suspected rape of a white woman by a black ex-convict, the reported rape of a young white woman by a black man on June 15, 1943, set off a violent reaction among white workers at the Pennsylvania Shipyards. In the early evening, approximately two thousand workers marched on downtown Beaumont. Police Chief Ross Dickey persuaded the mob not to lynch any black prisoners. Around midnight, mobs converged on black neighborhoods in north Beaumont and along Forsythe Street. At the Greyhound bus station, about three hundred whites assaulted fifty-two African American army draftees. Whites looted and burned local businesses and assaulted African Americans until the next morning. Killed during the evening’s violence were Alex Mouton and John Johnson, African Americans, and Ellis C. Brown, a white man. Local law enforcement tried diligently to stop the rioting. More than two hundred whites and six African Americans were arrested during the rioting. Martial law was declared on June 16 and lifted on June 20. Although calm had been restored to Beaumont, the violence compelled approximately twenty-five hundred African Americans to leave soon after the riots. Detroit and Harlem One of the worst riots in the summer of 1943 occurred in Detroit. On Sunday, June 20, 1943, more than one hundred thousand Detroiters, a large percentage of them African American, had gone to the Belle Isle Amusement Park. A group of black teenagers led by Charles “Little Willie” Lyon began attacking whites. A fight broke out between white sailors and young African Americans on the bridge connecting Belle Isle with the city. The fighting

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spread, and by 11:00 p.m., an estimated five thousand people were fighting on and around the Belle Isle Bridge. Rumors of atrocities against African Americans circulated in the Paradise Valley ghetto. Black rioters stoned passing cars of whites and destroyed white-owned businesses. By early morning, whites along Woodward Avenue had retaliated by beating African Americans. Mayor Edward J. Jeffries asked Governor Harry F. Kelly to request federal troops, but Kelly hesitated until Monday evening, and federal troops did not arrive until Tuesday morning. As African Americans rioted along the east side of Woodward Avenue, whites continued congregating along Woodward Avenue. Detroit remained under a curfew and martial law for the following week, and federal troops remained for two weeks. After two days of intense rioting, the Detroit riots were over. Authorities reported thirty-four people, mostly African Americans, killed and more than seven hundred injured. Property damage estimates were around two million dollars. As the situation calmed in Detroit, tensions were mounting in Harlem, New York. On August 1, 1943, in the late afternoon, Robert Bandy, an African American soldier on leave from the army, argued with James Collins, a white policeman, over the arrest of a black woman at the Braddock Hotel on West 126th Street. A fight ensued, and Collins shot Bandy, inflicting a superficial wound. Rumors quickly spread that a black soldier trying to protect his mother had been killed by a white policeman. Crowds of angry African Americans gathered at the Braddock Hotel and the twenty-eighth police precinct, and by midnight, rioting had started. The rioting centered in Harlem and never directly involved confrontations between black and white people. Mayor Fiorello H. La Guardia acted swiftly to confine the violence by using extra police, firefighters, black Office of Civilian Defense volunteers, and National Guardsmen. African American civic leaders such as Walter White worked alongside city officials to calm Harlem residents. The all-night looting and burning of whiteowned businesses left Harlem looking like a war zone. By the time peace was restored, after twelve hours of rioting, six Afri-

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can Americans had been killed by police and National Guard troops, and almost two hundred people reported injuries. Property damage was estimated to be as high as five million dollars. The racial violence of the summer of 1943 had ended, but the problems that triggered riots and violence across the nation remained. Craig S. Pascoe Further Reading John Morton Blum’s V Was for Victory: Politics and American Culture During World War II (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1976) examines established segregation and prejudice in the United States during World War II. Dominic J. Capeci, Jr.’s The Harlem Riot of 1943 (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1977) argues that African Americans became disillusioned with social gains that were meager compared with their contributions to the war effort. Alfred McClung Lee’s Race Riot, Detroit 1943 (1943; reprint, New York: Octagon Books, 1968) is a firsthand account of the Detroit riots. See also Clinton massacre; Defense industry desegregation; Los Angeles riots; Miami riots; President’s Committee on Civil Rights; Race riots of 1866; Race riots of 1967; Race riots of the twentieth century; Watts riot

Race riots of 1967 Definition: Race riots plague major cities across the United States Date: April-August, 1967 Place: Newark, New Jersey; Detroit, Michigan; and other major cities Despite the gains made the Civil Rights movement through the mid1960’s, racially motivated civil disturbances erupted in nearly 150 American cities during the summer of 1967—raising questions about the future of both the Civil Rights movement and the nation as a whole.

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From Omaha, Nebraska, in April, to Washington, D.C., in August, during the summer of 1967, race riots wracked nearly 150 U.S. cities. The most severe of these civil disorders were the July riots in Newark, New Jersey—which left twenty-seven dead (most of whom were African Americans), more than eleven hundred injured, and fifteen million dollars in property damage—and in Detroit, Michigan. In the wake of the Detroit riot, President Lyndon B. Johnson established a National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders, with Governor Otto Kerner of Illinois as its chairman. Other members included New York mayor John V. Lindsay, vice chairman; Senator Edward Brooke of Massachusetts; Senator Fred R. Harris of Oklahoma; Congressman James C. Corman of California; Congressman William M. McCullough of Ohio; Roy Wilkins of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP); the president of the Steelworkers’ Union, I. W. Abel; the chairman of Litton Industries, Charles B. (Tex) Thornton; Kentucky commerce commissioner Katherine Graham Peden; and Atlanta police chief Herbert Jenkins. Members of the Kerner Commission were charged with investigating the origins of the disorders, the best methods of control, and the role of state, local, and federal authorities in handling them. They issued their report on March 1, 1968. Detroit At first glance, Detroit was a curious place for such a violent explosion. Many African Americans commanded high wages in the automobile factories and high positions in the liberal United Auto Workers Union. Of Detroit’s 550,000 African Americans, 40 percent owned or were buying their homes. Community leaders, both white and black, had long made a civics lesson of the city’s bloody race riot of 1943, which had left thirty-four dead and moved President Franklin Roosevelt to send in federal troops. Detroit’s mayor, Jerome Cavanagh, had been elected with the support of the African American community. A trivial police incident provided the spark that ignited the Detroit ghetto. On July 23, a routine 4:00 a.m. raid of a speakeasy on a run-down street resulted in knots of African American onlookers taunting the police. Soon, a brick crashed through the

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window of a police cruiser. The police could have pulled out completely or responded with force to break up the crowds, but they did neither. They dispatched cruisers, but did nothing further. Mobs gathered and started fires; then looting began. As the fires spread, so did the looting, until it assumed a carnival atmosphere. Youngsters and adults raced from stores with their arms full of groceries, bottles of liquor, or jewelry; others filled their cars with appliances. Both the mayor and the governor seemed paralyzed. Given the fires and the stiflingly hot weather, Mayor Cavanagh ordered more swimming pools opened; Governor George Romney suggested seeding rain clouds above the ghetto. Neither police nor peacemakers could stop the riot. By midnight on July 24, President Johnson, emphasizing that his action came at the specific request of Governor Romney, used the authority of a 1795 law authorizing the president to use troops to put down an insurrection and announced that he was sending in federal troops to quell the disturbance. The trained, combat-hardened paratroopers quickly brought order to the eastern sector of the ghetto. The fighting then shifted back to the western sector, where ill-trained and jittery National Guardsmen combined with police to represent authority. Finally, the riot burned itself out. Aftermath A subsequent investigation by a team of reporters from the Detroit Free Press into the forty-three riot-related deaths (all but eight of them African Americans) found that most official reports about these deaths had been fabricated. Three African Americans had been riddled with bullets as they sat in a car. A deaf man was killed because he could not hear a warning. A child was gunned down while holding a broom. In order to head off congressional committees, Johnson moved quickly to get his own in operation. Within forty-two hours, the Kerner Commission was working in Washington, D.C. The president asked the commission to “guide the country through a thicket of tension, conflicting evidence, and extreme opinions.” Chairman Otto Kerner described it as an attempt to probe into the soul of the United States. The commission operated under two

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premises: that the nation must ensure the safety of its people, and that it must identify the root causes of racial disorder. The commission found that, although every civil disorder evolved from a complex set of circumstances, certain generalizations characterized the rioting and the rioters. The stereotype of race riots involving angry, poor African Americans attacking affluent whites was not accurate. The 1967 riots were racial, but not interracial. African Americans rose up against the property and authority of white America, not against white people. The typical rioter was an unmarried black man between fifteen and twentyfour years of age, a native of the city, underemployed, resentful of white stereotypes about African Americans, and generally better informed about politics than those African Americans not involved in the rioting. The commission described a central trend in a causal chain of “discrimination, prejudice, disadvantaged conditions, intense and pervasive grievances, a series of tensionheightening incidents, all culminating in the eruption of disorder at the hands of youthful, politically aware activists. . . .” The commission also identified a process that the riots followed. African American ghettos harbored many people with deep resentments about living conditions and police practices. A series of incidents, sometimes beginning with an event as minor as a routine traffic stop, caused mounting tension. A final precipitating incident usually happened after a hot day, on an evening when many people were on the street. Violence led to more violence and efforts at control by the authorities. Frustration exploded. The frustration had long historical roots. The commission noted that the historical pattern of black-white relations had been pervasive discrimination and segregation, resulting in white flight from the inner cities and the establishment of black ghettos. Most African Americans had been denied a share in the material benefits of the United States and had suffered indignity, disrespect, and lack of acceptance by white Americans. Many young African Americans felt alienated by these circumstances and flocked to the banner of Black Power. The commission concluded that the nation was rapidly moving toward two separate societies, one white and one black, separate and unequal. It warned about the possibility of sustained vi-

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olence in the nation’s cities and the loss of the democratic ideals of dignity, freedom, and equality of opportunity. It called for an expanded commitment to national action in order to open opportunities for all, to remove the frustration and powerlessness felt by minority communities, and to increase communication among races and thus end stereotypes and hostility. The need for action was dramatized by a December, 1967, memo to President Johnson from his pollsters. A public opinion survey in the aftermath of the riots showed a sharp polarization in white and black attitudes. Of whites, 45 percent blamed the riots on outside agitators with communist backing. Only 7 percent of African Americans saw it that way; 93 percent blamed general frustration. Two-thirds of the African Americans polled felt that the police had contributed to the riots, whereas only one-sixth of whites polled acknowledged police brutality. Johnson felt betrayed by what he called the “crazy riots,” which threatened to ruin everything he had tried to accomplish in civil rights. He never endorsed the Kerner Report, and elected officials failed to move on a campaign of national action to redress African American grievances. Brian G. Tobin Further Reading “An American Tragedy, 1967—Detroit.” Newsweek (August 7, 1967): 18-33. This article details events of the riot. The Encyclopedia Britannica’s Annals of America. Vol. 18, 1961-1968, pp. 651-653. Summarizes the Kerner Commission’s report. Goodwin, Richard N. Remembering America: A Voice from the Sixties. Boston: Little, Brown, 1988. A former Johnson speechwriter puts the riots in the context of the times. Kearns, Doris. Lyndon Johnson and the American Dream. New York: Harper & Row, 1976. Provides insight into the inner workings of the Johnson administration. Serrin, William. “The Crucible.” Columbia Journalism Review, January/February, 1991, 39-42. A journalist shares his firsthand account of the Detroit riot. See also Chicago riots; Los Angeles riots; Miami riots; Race riots of the twentieth century; Watts riot

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Race riots of the twentieth century The Events: Urban disorders arising from economic strains and competition among different racial groups Date: 1901-1992 Race riots both threaten the stability of society and, by their very occurrence, call into question the fundamental fairness of society. Referring to racial violence in the United States as “race riots” is often misleading. Many race riots were actually one-sided white massacres of African Americans; this was particularly true of those prior to 1921. Nineteenth century race riots were often called “slave revolts” or “slave insurrections.” These slave revolts were most frequent in the areas of the South where African Americans constituted at least 40 percent of the population. Fearing that slave revolts in one part of the South would trigger similar revolts throughout the South, slaveholders quelled such rebellions quickly and viciously. Twentieth century race riots differ from nineteenth century riots in both motive and location. Whereas nineteenth century riots were primarily concerned with maintaining the institution of slavery, twentieth century riots—particularly those in the years before World War II—were often designed to maintain white supremacy over urban African Americans. Also, where nineteenth century race riots were almost exclusively a southern phenomenon, twentieth century race riots took place in almost every major urban area of America. 1901-1945 Race riots prior to World War II often followed a consistent pattern. In almost all cases, the riots were initiated by whites against African Americans. In only two of the major riots—Harlem, New York, in 1935 and again in 1943—did African Americans initiate the riots. Second, most riots were caused by a white fear of African Americans competing for jobs that previously were held by whites. The rapid movement of African Americans from the South to the urban industrial areas of the North contributed to this fear. Third, most riots took place during the hot and humid

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summer months when young people were out of school. Finally, the riots were often fueled by rumors—allegations of police brutality against African Americans or allegations of black violence against whites heightened racial tensions. One of the major race riots during this period occurred in East St. Louis, Illinois, in 1917. An automobile occupied by four whites drove through black areas firing shots. When a similar car was seen, African Americans opened fire and killed two occupants, both of whom were police officers. Whites invaded the black community, burning three hundred homes and killing fifty African Americans. The summer of 1919 saw twenty riots in communities such as Charleston, South Carolina; Washington, D.C.; Knoxville, Tennessee; and Chicago. The riots of 1919 were so bloody that the period was called the “Red Summer.” Post-World War II Riots Although post-World War II riots were fueled by rumor and also took place during the summer months, they differed from pre-World War II riots in two important ways. First, a majority of the riots were initiated by African Americans, not whites. Second, many of the post-World War II riots were not confined to the black community. In several cases, whites were singled out as victims of black violence. The race riots of the 1960’s threatened to destroy the fabric of American society. The 1964 Harlem riot in New York City and the 1965 Watts riot in Los Angeles were both triggered by police incidents. The Watts riot lasted six days and resulted in thirty-four deaths and four thousand arrests. “Burn, baby, burn” became a battle cry in black ghettos throughout the United States. The year 1967 brought major riots to Newark, New Jersey, and to Tampa, Cincinnati, Atlanta, and Detroit. Newark’s riot was the most severe, resulting in twenty-seven deaths and at least fifteen million dollars in property damage. The assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr., on April 4, 1968, triggered racial violence in more than one hundred cities. In response to the urban racial violence, President Lyndon B. Johnson appointed the National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders, better known as the Kerner Commission. After investigating the causes of the

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rioting the commission presented a series of recommendations. According to the Kerner Commission, the most important grievances of the black community were police practices, lack of employment opportunities, and inadequate housing. The ominous conclusion of the Kerner Commission was that unless the causes of urban violence were addressed, the United States would continue to become two societies, one black, one white—separate and unequal. 1980’s and 1990’s Although there was a lull in race riots during the 1970’s, the Miami riots in May of 1980 signaled a renewal of urban racial unrest. On December 17, 1979, a black insurance agent, Arthur McDuffie, was stopped by Miami police officers after a highspeed chase. A fight ensued, and McDuffie was beaten to death. The police officers engaged in a cover-up and reported that McDuffie died as a result of a motorcycle crash. When the coverup unraveled, five Miami police officers were arrested. Four were charged with manslaughter, and one was charged with tampering with evidence. After deliberating less than three hours, an allwhite jury found all defendants not guilty. Within hours of the verdict, the Liberty City section of Miami exploded in violence. Before order was restored three days later, eighteen people were dead, including eight whites who had the misfortune to be driving through Liberty City when the riot began. The riot that took place in Los Angeles in May of 1992 was triggered by a similar event. Almost immediately after four white police officers were acquitted of assault in the videotaped beating of Rodney King, a black man, one of the most violent race riots in American history broke out. Before it was over, more than sixty people had died, more than four thousand fires had been set, and Los Angeles had suffered property damage totaling more than a billion dollars. Although the patterns of racial violence may have altered over the decades, the fact remains that race riots continue to occur. Once a southern phenomenon, they have become a national problem in search of a solution. Darryl Paulson

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Further Reading See James W. Button, Black Violence: Political Impact of the 1960’s Riots (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1978); Robert Connery, ed., Urban Riots (New York: Vintage Books, 1969); Bruce Porter and Marvin Dunn, The Miami Riot of 1980 (Lexington, Mass.: Lexington Books, 1984); Report of the National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders (New York: Bantam Books, 1968); and Elliott Rudwick, Race Riot at East St. Louis (New York: Atheneum, 1972). See also Black codes; Black Power movement; Chicago riots; Civil Rights movement; Clinton massacre; King beating case; League of Revolutionary Black Workers; Los Angeles riots; Miami riots; National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders; Race riots of 1866; Race riots of 1943; Race riots of 1967; Watts riot

Rainbow Coalition Identification: Multicultural rights advocacy organization founded under the leadership of the Reverend Jesse Jackson. Date: Founded in 1983 A multicultural effort to unify racial and ethnic groups that have been marginalized in the U.S. political process, the Rainbow Coalition flourished during the 1980’s but began to fragment during the 1990’s. Historically, racial and ethnic groups in the United States have experienced differing levels of participation in formal political institutions, leading to substantial inequalities in the distribution of political power among various groups. African Americans, for example, were historically excluded from participation in political processes through such legal and extralegal means as poll taxes, intimidation, and gerrymandering. What political power African Americans did acquire was often symbolic, achieved through appointments of black leaders to high-profile positions. This tradition led to the development of a black elite that accepted the role of junior partner in the process of

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achieving racial integration. Most of this leadership came from minority group members in nonelected positions and from extrapolitical movements such as strikes, boycotts, and acts of civil disobedience. In the early 1980’s, the Reverand Jesse Jackson organized a united front of liberal integrationists, socialists, trade unionists, feminists, gays, and racial minority constituencies to work together in his 1984 presidential campaign. The Rainbow Coalition platform was based on four premises: that Jackson had a base among the “black masses,” that he was an important figure in southern black politics, that the campaign would stimulate registration of black voters, and that Jackson’s presidential candidacy would create “coattail” effects that would propel other outsiders into the electoral process. None of these premises was supported by subsequent events. To appeal to a broad range of voters, Jackson moved the leftleaning Rainbow platform toward the political center for the time of the 1988 presidential campaign. Jackson purged the coalition of its activists by blocking democratic elections of local Rainbow leadership and by placing gag orders on radical dissenters. In 1989, Jackson asserted the right to appoint all coalition leaders at the congressional district rank. In response, thousands of activists left the coalition, and several splinter groups were organized. In the 1990’s, Democratic Party leaders including Bill Clinton acted to undermine Jackson’s leadership role in the African American community, severely diminishing the power of the Rainbow Coalition. Clinton’s 1992 presidential victory was followed by the political rise of Ron Brown, one of Jackson’s protégés, who had become the chair of the Democratic National Committee and was appointed secretary of commerce. Such developments led many members to leave the Rainbow Coalition and to adhere to Clinton’s policies. Glenn Canyon See also Civil Rights movement; Gerrymandering; Jackson’s run for the presidency

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Reconstruction The Event: Post-Civil War era during which the Republicancontrolled Union government took control of the defeated South and tried to force southern states to grant African Americans equal rights Date: 1866-1877 Reconstruction gave the Supreme Court a unique opportunity to extend full constitutional rights and protections to African Americans. Instead, however, the Court’s conservatism merely worked to undermine congressional Reconstruction plans. After the Civil War ended in early 1865 the U.S. government faced fundamental constitutional questions. That the Union was indestructible and states had no right to secede had been settled on the battlefield. However, the relation of the former Confederate states to the Union was unsettled, and the meaning of freedom for the former slaves remained to be worked out. Wresting control of Reconstruction from President Andrew Johnson, who was overanxious for reconciliation with the unrepentant white South, the Republican-controlled Congress passed a series of measures designed to secure a broad nationalization of civil rights and establish a rule of law strong enough to protect black Americans for the long haul. The Beginnings of Reconstruction There is no debate about when Reconstruction ended—with the 1877 inauguration of President Rutherford B. Hayes. However, many dates have been assigned to its beginnings. Many members of Congress initially believed that the Thirteenth Amendment (1865), which abolished slavery and empowered Congress to enforce its provision with appropriate legislation, would provide sufficient constitutional support for the newly freed people. However, it soon became evident that northerners and southerners held fundamentally different assumptions about what freedom meant. When the southern states enacted discriminatory laws—the notorious black codes—designed to keep African Americans in a

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slavelike condition, Congress imposed further restrictions on the recalcitrant South. In early 1866 Congress passed a Civil Rights Act that guaranteed basic legal rights to former slaves. President Andrew Johnson vetoed the bill, but Congress overrode his veto. In June Republican leaders in Congress proposed the Fourteenth Amendment, which would define African Americans as citizens and mandate that all federal and state laws apply equally to all citizens. President Johnson urged the states to reject it (which all former Confederate states except Tennessee did), but the Fourteenth Amendment was finally ratified two years later, in 1868. A third “Civil War amendment,” the Fifteenth, was proposed in 1869. Ratified the following year, it outlawed denying any citizen the right to vote because of race. Meanwhile, in 1867, Congress passed a series of laws called the Reconstruction Acts. These laws abolished the South’s newly formed state governments and placed every former Confederate state, except Tennessee, in a military district governed by federal troops, under martial law. States wishing to qualify for readmission to the Union were required to write new constitutions that would allow for black suffrage. They also had to ratify the Thirteenth and Fourteenth Amendments and democratically elect new state governments. Black voters participated in every step of this process. By 1870 all southern states were readmitted to the Union under reconstituted state governments. However, white southerners never recognized the legality of their integrated state governments. Nightriders of the Ku Klux Klan terrorized black voters despite the ratification of the Fifteenth Amendment (1870). Congress responded in 1870, and again in 1871, with enforcement acts designed to stop Klan violence and enforce the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments against private acts of violence, as well as illegal state actions. Responsibility for interpreting these new amendments and the laws that supported them eventually fell on the U.S. Supreme Court Constitutional Issues The fact that the three Civil War amendments made some changes in the federal system seemed clear. However, the exact

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Dates of Confederate States’ Readmission to the Union Vi We rg st in ia

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86

Virginia 1870

North Carolina 1870 South Carolina 1868

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Arkansas 1868

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Indian Territory

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868

The Reconstruction Acts of 1867 divided the ten states of the Deep South into military districts under martial law. An army general overseeing each district was charged with securing a new electorate, enrolling former slaves, and disfranchising former rebels for the purpose of providing for more efficient government in the former rebel states. Thus—over the objections of moderate Republicans and with the aid of sympathetic Democrats—Radical Reconstruction succeeded in disfranchising former Confederate leaders. Radical Reconstruction also required that the Southern states present acceptable state constitutions to Congress and ratify the Fourteenth Amendment before readmission to the Union would be granted.

nature of those changes was less clear. For example, the question of precisely which privileges and immunities national citizenship conveyed remained. It was not clear whether the Fourteenth Amendment “nationalized” the Bill of Rights, making its provisions apply to the states as well as to the federal government. It was also unclear whether the national government was empowered to protect black citizens against private interference with their rights. Other questions included the matter of whether the Fourteenth Amendment’s state action provision limited federal intervention to cases in which there was statutory discrimination. Was segregation a remnant of slavery outlawed by the Thirteenth Amendment? Did the Fifteenth Amendment

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provide a positive right to vote? These constitutional issues found their way into the lower federal courts and made their way to the Supreme Court at a time when most northerners had tired of southern questions. The Court’s conservative, formalistic answers to these questions effectively eroded the constitutional rights of African Americans living in the South. By the end of the nineteenth century their future was firmly under control of white southerners. Fourteenth Amendment Controversies The Supreme Court first articulated its interpretation of the Fourteenth Amendment in the so-called Slaughterhouse Cases (1873). Ironically, these cases involved neither African Americans nor the U.S. government itself as parties. For this reason, the Court was able to construe the Fourteenth Amendment apart from the potentially explosive racial issues of Reconstruction. The cases themselves originated in Louisiana, whose state legislature had granted a meat-slaughtering monopoly in New Orleans that threatened to drive all other butchers out of business. A group of white butchers hurt by this monopoly brought suit, claiming that the monopoly denied them their equal privileges and immunities under the Fourteenth Amendment. Slaughterhouse presented an opportunity for the Court to recognize that the Fourteenth Amendment had radically altered the federal system, making the U.S. government responsible for protecting the rights of all citizens. However, it was not to be. Justice Samuel F. Miller, speaking for a closely split majority, chose a rigidly narrow interpretation that adhered to a traditional understanding of dual federalism—the notion that state and federal government were sovereign in their separate spheres. National citizenship and state citizenship were separate and distinct, according to Slaughterhouse, and only the privileges and immunities of national citizenship could be protected by the United States. The states were still responsible for protecting the basic day-to-day rights of their own citizens. The Slaughterhouse precedent seriously limited the protections of the Fourteenth Amendment for African Americans, who had hoped to find a federal shelter under the Fourteenth Amendment when

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the governments of the southern states refused to protect their rights. The Court’s ruling in United States v. Cruikshank in 1876 continued to narrow the scope of rights that federal courts could protect under the Fourteenth Amendment. Cruikshank involved a race riot in Louisiana, in which perhaps a hundred black Republicans were killed by white Democrats. Closely following Joseph Bradley’s circuit court opinion, Chief Justice Morrison R. Waite— recently appointed by President Ulysses S. Grant—announced that the Bill of Rights protected citizens only against actions of the national government. The due process clause, Waite declared, established protection “against arbitrary and unjust legislation,” but did not protect African Americans from private acts of violence. United States v. Harris (1883) made more explicit the stateaction concept implicit in Cruikshank by overturning portions of the Civil Rights Act of 1871 (also known as the Second Enforcement Act) because they punished private wrongs without reference to state law. Fifteenth Amendment Issues United States v. Reese (1876), a companion case to Cruikshank, construed the Fifteenth Amendment for the first time. Waite ruled that this amendment did not establish a positive right to vote but did establish a constitutional right not to be discriminated against because of race. Reese declared parts of the First Enforcement Act unconstitutional for overbreadth, while leaving standing sections of the law that explicitly prohibited voter discrimination because of race. This ruling enabled lower federal courts to continue to prosecute voter discrimination cases. Within a few years, however, the southern states devised other, allegedly nonracial, ways of disfranchising African Americans. These included poll taxes, grandfather clauses, and literacy tests. Civil Rights Cases The Civil Rights cases (1883) tested the constitutionality of the Civil Rights Act of 1875, which made it a misdemeanor to deny equal access to privately owned places of business such as hotels, theaters, and public transportation. The five cases that made their

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way to the Supreme Court in 1883 originated in New York, California, Kansas, Missouri, and Tennessee, demonstrating that the issue of racial discrimination was not limited to former Confederate states in the South. Grounding his ruling in the state action concept of the Fourteenth Amendment, Joseph Bradley, speaking for an eight-person majority, declared the Civil Rights Act unconstitutional. The national government could not reach private wrongs under the Fourteenth Amendment; it was limited to cases of overtly discriminatory state law. The Court also ruled that the Thirteenth Amendment did not support the Civil Rights Act. Although there was no state-action limitation in the Thirteenth Amendment, segregation was not a “badge of slavery” prohibited by the amendment. Justice John Marshall Harlan, a Kentuckian, former slave owner, and opponent of the Fourteenth Amendment, was the only voice of dissent in the Civil Rights cases. Harlan found ample authority for the Civil Rights Act in both the Thirteenth and Fourteenth Amendments. Segregation was a burden of slavery in Harlan’s mind, therefore the Thirteenth Amendment’s enabling clause gave Congress authority to legislate against it. Moreover, Harlan read the Fourteenth Amendment broadly, finding authority there for the national government to protect the former slaves in all their rights. Pro-black Decisions The Reconstruction-era Court clearly did not champion African American rights, but it did occasionally decide cases in their favor. In Ex parte Yarbrough (1884), for example, Justice Miller ruled that Congress had authority, under Article 1, section 4 of the Constitution, to protect national elections without benefit of the Fifteenth Amendment. Thus the national government retained broad powers to protect African Americans in federal elections against both state officials and private individuals. Under this ruling, the federal courts continued a vigorous prosecution of voting rights offenders through the 1880’s. In a series of jury cases, the Supreme Court again supported African American rights in cases of overt state action. Strauder v. West Virginia (1880), for example, overturned a state statute re-

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quiring all-white juries as a violation of the Fourteenth Amendment’s equal protection clause. Ex parte Virginia, decided the same term, upheld the prosecution of a state judge who had systematically excluded African Americans from juries in his court. In Virginia v. Rives (1880), however, the Court ruled that the mere absence of African Americans on juries in situations in which no discriminatory state law existed did not demonstrate deliberate racial exclusion; the burden of proof was on the aggrieved parties. Southern states were quick to discern that this decision left room for exclusion that was implicit in the system rather than explicit. Women and the Fourteenth Amendment The Reconstruction-era court was even more conservative in addressing women’s rights issues than it was African American issues. Women who hoped to use the Fourteenth Amendment to overturn discriminatory state legislation were disappointed. In Bradwell v. Illinois (1873), Justice Miller ruled that the amendment’s equal protection clause did not remove gender restrictions for admission to the bar. Chief Justice Waite decreed in Minor v. Happersett (1875) that the amendment did not extend to women the right to vote. Joseph Bradley, concurring in Bradwell, appears to have summed up the attitude of the Court in his later infamous observation that a woman’s “destiny and mission” is to be a wife and mother. While African Americans had made some progress under the Fourteenth Amendment, the status of women remained unchanged. Conservatism vs. Racism Even though the Reconstruction-era Court was not generous to African Americans, its rulings were grounded more in conservative adherence to traditional notions of dual federalism than in overt racism. While the Court insisted on a state-action theory of the Fourteenth Amendment, it moved to protect African American rights in cases of overt state action. Not until two decades after Reconstruction ended did the Court establish a judicial doctrine that explicitly sanctioned racial segregation.

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Under Chief Justice Melville W. Fuller, the Court’s overtly racist Plessy v. Ferguson decision of 1896 upheld a Louisiana statute that outlawed racial mixing on railroad cars. Winking at the differences between black and white cars, Henry Brown for the Court established the notorious separate but equal doctrine, which the Court did not overturn until 1954. Again, as in the Civil Rights cases, Harlan was the Court’s only voice of dissent. Harlan decried the “thin disguise of ‘equal’ accommodations” and prophesied accurately that Plessy would eventually prove as damaging to the nation as the Court’s 1857 Scott v. Sandford decision. The Supreme Court failed during Reconstruction to establish the constitutional rights of African Americans. The justices’ conservatism, racism, and formalistic readings of the law worked against extending federal protections to African Americans. However, it should be kept in mind that the justices reflected the racial and legal values of their time. The Court would not fully support African American rights until the Warren Court instituted what has been called the “second Reconstruction” era during the 1950’s and 1960’s. Lou Falkner Williams Further Reading Literature on Reconstruction is voluminous. Heather Cox Richardson’s The Death of Reconstruction: Race, Labor, and Politics in the Post-Civil War North, 1865-1901 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2001) is an excellent addition to the literature on Reconstruction. Gao Chunchang’s African Americans in the Reconstruction Era (New York: Garland, 2000) is a serviceable treatment of the topic. Beginners might well begin with an overview of the Reconstruction-era Court. John R. Howard’s The Shifting Wind: The Supreme Court and Civil Rights from Reconstruction to Brown (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1999) is up-to-date, accessible, and engagingly written. Howard is particularly enlightening on the racial attitudes of individual justices and their impact on Court dynamics, though he may overstate the real impact of Court decisions on life in the South. Donald G. Nieman’s Promises to Keep: African-Americans and the Constitutional Order, 1776 to the Present (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991) is

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more balanced. For an excellent liberal overview see William M. Wiecek’s Liberty Under Law: The Supreme Court in American Life (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1988). For a more conservative view of the Court and federal policy, see Michael Les Benedict’s “Preserving Federalism: Reconstruction and the Waite Court,” Supreme Court Review (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978). More detailed information is provided in Harold M. Hyman and William M. Wiecek’s Equal Justice Under Law: Constitutional Development 1835-1875 (New York: Harper, 1982); Loren Miller’s The Petitioners: The Story of the Supreme Court of the United States and the Negro (New York: Pantheon Books, 1966); and Herman Belz’s Emancipation and Equal Rights: Politics and Constitutionalism in the Civil War Era (New York: W. W. Norton, 1978). The most detailed and authoritative information available can be found in Charles Fairman’s Reconstruction and Reunion, 1864-88, 2 vols. (New York: Macmillan, 1987). A detailed analysis of the difficulties of implementing the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments at the state level is Lou Falkner Williams’s The Great South Carolina Ku Klux Klan Trials, 1871-1872 (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1996). See also Black codes; Charleston race riots; Civil Rights Act of 1866; Civil Rights Acts of 1866-1875; Civil War; Clinton massacre; Colfax massacre; Compromise of 1877; Disfranchisement laws in Mississippi; Emancipation Proclamation; Fifteenth Amendment; Fourteenth Amendment; Freedmen’s Bureau; Ku Klux Klan; Ku Klux Klan Acts; Negro Conventions; Race riots of 1866; Separate but equal doctrine; Sharecropping; Slaughterhouse Cases; Slavery and the justice system; Thirteenth Amendment

Reitman v. Mulkey The Case: U.S. Supreme Court ruling on housing discrimination Date: May 29, 1967 The Supreme Court found a housing provision in the California state constitution to be unconstitutional because it involved the state in private racial discrimination.

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In 1959 and 1963, California established fair housing laws. These statutes banned racial discrimination in the sale or rental of private housing. In 1964, acting under the initiative process, the California electorate passed Proposition 14. This measure amended the state constitution so as to prohibit the state government from denying the right of any person to sell, lease, or refuse to sell or lease his or her property to another at his or her sole discretion. The fair housing laws were effectively repealed. Mr. and Mrs. Lincoln Mulkey sued Neil Reitman in a state court, claiming that he had refused to rent them an apartment because of their race. They claimed that Proposition 14 was invalid because it violated the equal protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. If Proposition 14 was unconstitutional, the fair housing laws would still be in force. The Mulkeys won in the California Supreme Court, and Reitman appealed to the Supreme Court of the United States. Justice Byron White’s opinion for the five-justice majority admitted that mere repeal of an antidiscrimination statute would not be unconstitutional. In this case, however, the California Supreme Court had held that the intent of Proposition 14 was to encourage and authorize private racial discrimination. This encouragement amounted to “state action” that violated the equal protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. The four dissenters in the case agreed on an opinion by Justice John M. Harlan. Harlan argued that California’s mere repeal of its fair housing laws did not amount to encouraging and authorizing discrimination. If the repeal were to be seen that way, then a state could never rid itself of a statute whose purpose was to protect a constitutional right, whether of racial equality or some other. Harlan also suggested that opponents of antidiscrimination laws would later be able to argue that such laws not be passed because they would be unrepealable. Indeed, several ballot measures which have reversed or repealed civil rights laws protecting gays and lesbians have been struck down on the basis of Reitman v. Mulkey. Reitman v. Mulkey has not had a major effect on American civil rights law. The Supreme Court has not been disposed to expand the “authorization” and “encouragement” strands of constitu-

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tional thought. The principle of “state action”—which is all that the Fourteenth Amendment equal protection rules can reach— has not been further broadened. Nevertheless, the precedent remains, with its suggestion that there is an affirmative federal constitutional duty on state governments to prevent private racial discrimination. Robert Jacobs See also Fair Housing Act; Fourteenth Amendment; Patterson v. McLean Credit Union

Republic of New Africa Identification: Revolutionary black nationalist organization Date: Founded in 1968 Place: Detroit, Michigan Never more than a fringe movement, the Republic of New Africa is significant mostly for keeping alive the concept of reparations for slavery. Founded in 1968, the Republic of New Africa (RNA) was a revolutionary black nationalist organization whose primary objective was the territorial separation of African Americans from the rest of the United States. Its leaders proposed to make the five southern states considered the “Black Belt”—Mississippi, Louisiana, Alabama, Georgia, and South Carolina—an independent blackruled nation. The organization also advocated cooperative economics and community self-sufficiency (as defined by the Tanzanian principles of “Ujamaa”); and the collection of reparations from the U.S. government in the amount of ten thousand dollars per person to compensate for retrenchment of the Reconstruction promise of “forty acres and a mule” to freed slaves. The Republic of New Africa formed a government for the “non-self-governing African Americans held captive within the United States.” “Consulates” were established in New York, Baltimore, Pittsburgh, Philadelphia, Washington, D.C., and Jackson, Mississippi. The RNA was seen as an internal threat to the security of the United States and targeted for attack by the U.S. federal

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government. In 2005, the organization still maintained an office in Washington, D.C., and claimed a membership of ten thousand people. M. Bahati Kuumba See also Black Christian Nationalist Movement; Black Power movement; National Coalition of Blacks for Reparations in America

Restrictive covenants Definition: Private agreements or contracts meant to deny privilege, usually housing, on the basis of race, gender, or ethnicity Throughout the early twentieth century, restrictive covenants were major tools in the maintainance of segregated housing in American cities. However, the U.S. Supreme Court first limited, then banned, the covenants, helping reduce housing discrimination. A common practice in northern and western cities, restrictive covenants were a prime example of de facto segregation practices. Typically the covenants required buyers not to resell their homes to African Americans, Latinos, Asians, Jews, or other ethnic/racial groups not wanted in the neighborhood or community, allowing builders to create all-white suburbs and schools. Initially, the Supreme Court permitted restrictive covenants on the grounds that the court had no jurisdiction over private property transfers. The Supreme Court took its first step toward limiting restrictive covenants in Shelley v. Kraemer (1948), in which it ruled that states that enforced restrictive covenants were liable to be prosecuted for civil rights violations even if the individual homeowners were not. In Jones v. Alfred H. Mayer Company (1968), the Court rejected the legality of restrictive covenants under the provisions against discrimination in sale or rental of property to African Americans found in the Civil Rights Act of 1866. In banning covenants, Mayer also cited the enforcement clause of the Thirteenth Amendment, which gave Congress the authority to determine

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and eliminate the “badges and incidents of slavery.” The case also legitimized the Title VIII provisions of the Civil Rights Act of 1968, which guaranteed housing rights regardless of race or ethnicity. Steven J. Ramold See also Jim Crow laws; Jones v. Alfred H. Mayer Company; Segregation; Shelley v. Kraemer; Thirteenth Amendment

Roots Identification: Book by Alex Haley tracing his family’s history back to West Africa Date: Published in 1976; adapted to television in 1977 One of the most widely read works ever written by an African American, Roots: The Saga of an American Family helped to bring African American history closer to the mainstream in the consciousness of both black and white Americans. Alex Haley’s Roots relates the history of seven generations of an African American family in the United States. Haley began the story by detailing the life of his ancestor, Kunta Kinte, who was sold into slavery and taken to the United States. Haley introduced readers to U.S. history as experienced by African Americans. His work was so compelling that Haley received a Pulitzer Prize for Roots. Network television serialized the saga in 1977, and it received tremendous attention and large viewerships. More than 130 million viewers reportedly tuned in to watch the incredible tale, which featured some of the most popular actors of the 1970’s. Historians praised the television series, which is now available on video in most school libraries and video stores, for its accurate depictions of U.S. history and eye for detail. In 2005, the miniseries still ranked among the three most-watched television programs in U.S. history. Many people argue that both the book and the television miniseries had a significant impact on race relations because it intro-

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O. J. Simpson (left) and LeVar Burton in an episode of Roots set in Africa. (Capitol Cities/ABC, Inc.)

duced many Americans to the severity of the African American experience and depicted black people as fully American human beings. Perhaps significantly, the subtitle of the book is “The Saga of an American Family,” not “The Saga of an African American Family.” Donald C. Simmons, Jr. See also Film history; Literature; Slavery; Slavery and race relations

Runyon v. McCrary The Case: U.S. Supreme Court ruling on private school segregation Date: June 25, 1976 In this case, the Supreme Court broadened the meaning of Title 42, section 1981 of the 1866 Civil Rights Act to outlaw discrimination in all contracts.

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Parents of African American children brought suit in federal court against private schools in Virginia that had denied their children admission. Disregarding the defendant schools’ argument that a government-imposed obligation to admit African American students to their unintegrated student bodies would violate constitutionally protected rights of free association and privacy, the district and appellate courts both ruled in the parents’ favor, enjoining the schools from discriminating on the basis of race. The parents had based their case on a section of the 1866 Civil Rights Act that was still in effect. In 1968, the Supreme Court had held in Jones v. Alfred H. Mayer Company that section 1982 of the act prohibited racial discrimination among private parties in housing. In Runyon, the Court broadened this holding to imply that section 1981, the act’s right-to-contract provision, outlawed all discriminatory contracts, whether involving public or private parties—including one between private schools and the parents of student applicants. In the wake of Runyon, lower federal courts employed section 1981 to outlaw racial discrimination in a wide variety of areas, including banking, security deposit regulations, admissions to amusement parks, insurance, and mortuaries. The breadth of the Court’s interpretation in Runyon of section 1981 also caused it to overlap with Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, governing employment contracts. This overlap, together with ongoing concern about the extensiveness of the interpretation of section 1981, caused the Court to consider overruling Runyon in Patterson v. McLean Credit Union (1989). Instead, Patterson severely restricted Runyon by declaring that section 1981 did not apply to postcontractual employer discrimination. Patterson went so far as to declare that although section 1981 protected the right to enter into employment contracts, it did not extend to future breaches of that contract or to the imposition of discriminatory working conditions. Congress in turn overruled this narrow reading of section 1981 in the Civil Rights Act of 1991, which includes explicit language permitting courts to prohibit employment discrimination that takes place after hiring.

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The reason for the Court’s about-face with regard to section 1981 can be found in its changing political composition. Runyon was decided midway through Chief Justice Warren Burger’s tenure, when the Court was dominated by justices who occupied the middle of the political spectrum. In 1986, however, one of two dissenters in Runyon, Justice William H. Rehnquist, succeeded Burger, carrying with him his conservative agenda. Rehnquist, who had always been outspoken in his criticism of what he regarded as the Court’s excess of liberalism under Chief Justice Earl Warren, dissented in Runyon on grounds that the Warren-era Jones case had been improperly decided. By 1989, when the Court handed down its decision in Patterson, Rehnquist had been joined by enough fellow conservative thinkers to overrule Runyon’s interpretation of section 1981 by one vote. See also Civil Rights Act of 1991; Civil Rights Acts of 1866-1875; Jones v. Alfred H. Mayer Company; Patterson v. McLean Credit Union

School desegregation Definition: Legal and social movement to end separate schooling for white and nonwhite students School desegregation during the 1950’s began to turn the United States away from a long history of racially unequal education. By 1950, segregated schools had had a long history in the United States. In the decades after the Civil War, state and local governments, especially in the South, created separate institutions and facilities for white and nonwhite citizens. In 1896, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in the case of Plessy v. Ferguson that racial segregation was constitutional. The Court stated that different races could legally be treated separately, as long as they were treated equally. Since the Court provided no way of measuring equality, this ruling essentially recognized all forms of segregation. The Plessy ruling was quickly applied to schools. In 1899, the Supreme Court upheld a Georgia school board’s action to close a black high school and build two black elementary schools in its

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stead and then encourage the displaced black high school students to continue their educations in parochial schools. The Supreme Court did not interfere in the board’s refusal to allow the black students to attend the white high school, ruling that the entire issue was a state, not a federal, matter. In the 1908 case of Berea College v. Kentucky, the Court upheld a Kentucky law that mandated that no educational institution could provide instruction for black and white people unless classrooms for each race were at least twenty-five miles apart. As black populations grew outside the South during the first half of the twentieth century, local governments and school boards outside the South also segregated their school systems. Legal Challenges to Segregation During the 1930’s, an attorney for the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), Nathan Margold, devised a strategy for challenging school segregation. Margold recommended that the NAACP concentrate on legal attacks on the inequality of separate schools systems, rather than on the segregation itself. The NAACP established the Legal Defense and Educational Fund (LDF, often known as the “Legal Defense Fund”) to pursue this strategy. At first, legal efforts under the direction of LDF attorney Thurgood Marshall concentrated on graduate and professional schools, on the grounds that exclusion from these white-only institutions usually left aspiring black students without any options at all, and therefore such exclusion could not claim the justification of “separate but equal.” The beginning of the 1950’s saw two of the first major legal victories for school desegregation. Herman Sweatt, an African American living in Texas, had applied for admission to the prestigious University of Texas law school. When he was denied admission, he sued on the grounds that there was no Texas law school for black students. The state of Texas responded by setting up a new black law school in the basement of a petroleum company. Sweatt pressed his case for admission to the Supreme Court, which, in the case of Sweatt v. Painter (1950), ruled in Sweatt’s favor. The Sweatt decision established that

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simply having separate law schools did not provide educational equality. In a second 1950 case, McLaurin v. Oklahoma State Regents for Higher Education, the idea that separate physical facilities do not provide equal education was extended to professional schools in general. These two cases provided the legal foundation for school desegregation as the NAACP lawyers turned attention from higher education to primary and secondary schools. The Brown Decision In several cases around the nation, the NAACP backed African American families who were suing because state laws had forbidden their children to attend schools with white students, even when the white schools were closer and had better resources than black schools. The case Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas went to the Supreme Court to test the legality of school segregation in all parts of the United States. The Brown case began in 1951 when the daughter of a minister in Kansas was refused entry to a local white school. On May 17, 1954, the Supreme Court, under the leadership of Chief Justice Earl Warren, ruled that separate schools were inherently unequal and were subsequently illegal. This ruling is generally known as Brown I. One year later, on May 31, 1955, the Court issued a second ruling on the case, known as Brown II, which ordered local school boards to desegregate “with all deliberate speed” and handed over direction of school desegregation to lower federal courts. Massive Resistance The Brown decision made the segregation of public schools illegal, and it predictably met opposition. In 1955, a poll conducted by the Gallup Organization showed that school desegregation did have substantial support in many areas of the country. According to this poll, most Americans in the East, Midwest, and West were in favor of eliminating separate schooling for black and white students. However, in the South, where a majority of African Americans lived, 80 percent of respondents were opposed to the Brown ruling.

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In 1956, Virginia senator Harry Byrd publicly called for massive resistance to the Brown order, and 101 southern senators and congressmen signed the Southern Manifesto, which declared that the Brown decision itself had been illegal. The term “massive resistance” quickly became a motto of many southern politicians, and the term came to be used as a label for the period in school desegregation from 1955 to the early 1960’s. During 1956, the legislatures of South Carolina, Alabama, Georgia, Mississippi, and Virginia passed resolutions declaring that the Brown decision had no authority in their states. This was based on the doctrine of interposition, a pre-Civil War political theory that held that states could intervene to prevent the enforcement of federal policies that were in violation of states’ rights. Several states passed laws to attempt to maintain dual school systems as long as possible. Some laws created standards for admission to white schools that virtually ensured no black students could enroll. Other laws gave permission to local authorities to close public schools that were being desegregated. The Virginia Assembly, for example, passed legislation authorizing the closing of any school that allowed black and white people to attend together. In 1959, the Prince Edward County school board in Virginia did shut down the entire school system for five years rather than allow black children to sit next to white children in the same classrooms. This kind of massive resistance often had great support from white populations. In New Orleans, Louisiana, where a federal judge had ordered white schools to admit African American pupils in 1956, the school board president conducted an opinion poll of parents. In this poll, 82 percent of white parents said that they would rather shut down the public schools than accept any integration. Encouraged by the Brown decision, the NAACP mounted a legal offensive against the segregated schools that many state and local governments were so stubbornly defending. In Virginia alone, during a three-month period in 1956, the NAACP filed suits against local school boards in Arlington, Norfolk, Newport News, and Charlottesville. It became increasingly clear that enforcing the Supreme Court decision would not be easy. The most famous struggle to enforce the decision took place in Little Rock, Arkansas.

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The Battle in Little Rock Events in Little Rock put school desegregation on television and on the front pages of newspapers around the country. The crisis in Little Rock erupted in 1957. Shortly before the beginning of the school year, on August 27, the Little Rock’s Mothers League sought an injunction to halt plans for school integration. The injunction was granted by Pulaski County Chancellor Murray Reed, but it was rejected three days later by federal district judge Ronald Davies. The enrollment of the African American students might have proceeded in a relatively peaceful manner if the governor had not used it for political advantage. Arkansas governor Orval Faubus was searching for political support to win a third term in office and decided that he could appeal to whites eager to preserve segregation. Faubus declared that he would not be able to maintain order if Central High School were integrated, and on September 2, he ordered the National Guard to surround the school. The local NAACP organized the nine African American students slated to enroll in Central High to arrive in a group. They were met by National Guardsmen who turned the students away with bayonets. One of the students arrived after the others and was confronted by screaming segregationists. Television, which occupied a central place in most American homes by 1957, broadcast the scenes from Little Rock around the nation. Alarmed by the developments in his city, on September 24, Little Rock mayor Woodrow Mann asked President Dwight D. Eisenhower for federal troops to maintain order. Eisenhower responded by sending one thousand troops of the 101st Airborne Division and placed the Arkansas National Guard under federal control. The troops escorted the nine students to the school each day. Many Americans were shocked to see that military protection was needed to protect the basic rights of citizens. Others were disturbed at what they believed was a federal military occupation of a state, reviving historical memories of the military occupation of the South during Reconstruction in the years following the Civil War. The Governor Intervenes On the opening of the 1958-1959 school year, Governor Orval Faubus ordered Little Rock public schools closed, and white stu-

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dents enrolled in private schools or in other districts. On September 27, 1958, Little Rock residents voted on school integration and overwhelmingly rejected it. However, on June 18, 1959, a federal court declared that closing Little Rock’s public schools was unconstitutional. Little Rock schools opened one month early for the 1959-1960 school year and enrolled both African American and white students. The legal decisions of the 1950’s, especially the Brown decision, laid the foundation for all desegregation efforts that would follow. The crisis at Little Rock and the period of “massive resistance” throughout the South brought school desegregation to the center of national attention. Although many schools continued to have majority white or majority African American student bodies, officially segregated schools were illegal by the end of the decade, and the nation began a long effort to achieve schools that were desegregated in practice. Subsequent Events The first part of the 1960’s continued the practice of open resistance to school desegregation by many state and local governments. This largely came to an end with the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA) of 1965. Under the first piece of legislation, the federal government acquired the power to cut off federal funds to any institution or organization engaging in racial discrimination. The Office of Civil Rights was charged with investigating school segregation, and the U.S. attorney general was given the authority to sue segregated school districts. The ESEA was the first successful major federal education bill, and it provided funding to school districts that spent money on desegregation. Carl L. Bankston III Further Reading Bankston, Carl L., III, and Stephen J. Caldas. A Troubled Dream: The Promise and Failure of School Desegregation in Louisiana. Nashville, Tenn.: Vanderbilt University Press, 2002. A detailed study of school desegregation in one state. The first chapter

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provides information and statistics on segregated schools in 1950. Bartley, Numan V. The Rise of Massive Resistance: Race and Politics in the South During the 1950’s. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1999. Originally published in 1969, this is a reprint of an excellent book on southern opposition to school desegregation. Cottrol, Robert J., Raymond T. Diamond, and Leland B. Ware. Brown v. Board of Education: Caste, Culture, and the Constitution. Lawrence: University of Kansas Press, 2003. Discusses the events leading to the historic decision and its consequences. Rossell, Christine H. “The Evolution of School Desegregation Plans Since 1954.” In The End of Desegregation?, edited by Stephen J. Caldas and Carl L. Bankston III. New York: Nova Science Publishers, 2003. Describes the changes in approaches to desegregation in the years following the Brown decision. See also Affirmative action; Black colleges and universities; Bolling v. Sharpe; Brown v. Board of Education; Civil Rights movement; Civil Rights movement and children; Education; Integration; Little Rock school desegregation crisis; National Association for the Advancement of Colored People; Southern Manifesto; Sweatt v. Painter; White Citizens’ Councils

Science and technology African Americans have made significant contributions to the fields of science and technology, despite the handicaps placed on their educational and research opportunities in the past, but the full extent of contributions made by African Americans during the slave era may never be known. The documented history of African Americans in science and technology does not extend back as far as it might. African American slaves clearly played major roles in the planning and building of the great plantations of the South during the slave era, but the scientific, architectural, and technological achievements of

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African Americans were ascribed to their masters. An example of this is the invention of a grain harvester, much of it based on technology devised by Joe Anderson, a slave owned by Cyrus McCormick. Credit for the McCormick reaper and the profits it produced accrued to the slaveowner. Under the United States Patent Act of 1790, free African Americans could be granted patents. However, slaves could neither receive patents nor assign their inventions to their masters to apply for patents. Because slaves were not United States citizens, they could not enter into contracts. Benjamin Banneker Given the conditions imposed by slavery, it is not surprising that only one African American in the eighteenth century has generally been widely recognized for scientific achievements. Benjamin Banneker was born in Baltimore in 1731, the son of a slave and a free African American mother, through whom his freedom was assured. Banneker’s singular intelligence was apparent during his early attempts at self-education. He excelled in mathematics and studied astronomy independently. He accurately predicted a solar eclipse in 1782. He is credited with constructing, in 1754, the first clock made in the New World. In 1790, after the site of the new nation’s capital was selected, President George Washington appointed Pierre L’Enfant and Banneker to the District of Columbia Commission to design the new city. The distinction made Banneker the first African American to receive a presidential appointment. After L’Enfant was dismissed from the project, he left, taking his papers, including his plans for the proposed capital city, with him. Banneker reconstructed from memory L’Enfant’s complicated plans for the new city. He also drew on his knowledge of astronomy and meteorology to publish an almanac that informed farmers of the optimal times for planting. This almanac continued periodic publication until Banneker’s death in 1806. Nineteenth Century Inventors The documented history of inventions by African Americans before 1865 focuses on freemen. It is likely that many people held

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in slavery until after the Civil War were inventors; however, only anecdotal accounts of their inventions exist because they could not receive patents. Patent records do not indicate the race of recipients, but it is thought that Thomas L. Jennings, who received a patent for a dry cleaning technology in 1821, was the first African American to receive one. James Forten, Jr., a free black, patented a unique sailhandling device that seamen clamored to buy. Forten became so prosperous that he opened his own sail company, which, by 1832, had forty employees. Henry Blair of Maryland received a patent in 1834 for a corn planter that planted seed in checkerboard patterns and greatly reduced the amount of time required to sow fields. Among the most accomplished black scientists and inventors in pre-Civil War America was Norbert Rillieux, who studied mechanical engineering in Paris, where he also taught mathematics. Upon returning to his native New Orleans, he patented the technology for a multiple vacuum evaporation system to refine sugar, thereby revolutionizing the process by enabling one person to perform the work of several. This invention spawned significant changes in the worldwide production of food and made Rillieux rich, enabling him to settle permanently in France in 1854 to escape the racial discrimination that African Americans were subjected to in the South. Lewis Temple devised a whaling harpoon that made it virtually impossible for hooked whales to break loose. Whalers accepted his harpoon enthusiastically, but Temple neglected to patent his invention, so his rewards from it were negligible. Like most early African American inventors, Temple, who lived in Massachusetts, was an ardent abolitionist. Elijah McCoy’s invention of a lubricating device for the wheels of steam locomotives, which he patented in 1872, was widely imitated. Before this technological advance, steam locomotives were forced to stop periodically to have their wheels lubricated, thereby wasting time. McCoy’s invention permitted lubrication of the wheels while trains were moving. The term “the real McCoy” was coined to describe this invention by people making a distinction between McCoy’s device and imitations of it. McCoy

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also patented a system of air brakes used extensively by railroads. Another noteworthy inventor of the period, Lewis Henry Latimer, developed an important technology for producing the carbon filaments used in electric lights. He worked closely with Alexander Graham Bell, for whom he made the drawings that accompanied the patent applications Bell submitted for the telephone and other inventions. W. B. Purvis obtained sixteen patents, nine of which involved technologies for manufacturing paper bags. In 1883, he also patented a hand stamp that is still in use today. Humphrey Reynolds patented a ventilation system for railroad cars that was widely used by the Pullman Company. Granville Woods, nicknamed “the black Edison,” obtained twenty-two patents, many of them for devices concerned with railroad telegraphy. Probably the most lucrative inventions by African Americans around the turn of the century were the hair products invented and marketed by Madame C. J. Walker and Annie Turnbo Malone, designed to control the kinky hair of black women. Both women became millionaires by 1910. They were the first African American women to achieve that level of wealth. Scientists The best-known African American scientist is George Washington Carver, a Tuskegee professor and researcher, who devoted himself to teaching and doing research in agriculture. He publicized the benefits of crop rotation at a time when many farmers were depleting their soil from constant replanting. Carver focused considerable attention on peanuts and soybeans as cash crops and as crops that add nitrogen to depleted soil. He explored ways to use peanuts and soybeans inventively as inexpensive sources of protein. Born into slavery in 1864, Carver received a master’s degree from Iowa Agricultural State College, while becoming the first African American graduate of that institution. Carver was inducted into Great Britain’s Royal Society of Arts and Manufacturing and Commerce in 1916. In 1923, he received the Spingarn Medal of the National Association for the Advancement of

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Colored People (NAACP). In 1949, six years after his death, Carver was honored by having a postage stamp issued in recognition of his monumental contributions to American science. Marine biologist Ernest Just conducted pioneering research into cell division in marine worms. After teaching at Howard University, he moved to Berlin’s Kaiser Wilhelm Institute of Biology, where he remained until 1933, when the rise of Adolf Hitler drove him out. Unwilling to return to the United States, where his race would bar him from working in major science laboratories, he remained in Europe for the rest of his life. One of eight African Americans who received doctorates in pure mathematics between 1875 and 1943, David Blackwell became the first person of his race to gain a tenured professorship at the University of California at Berkeley in 1955. Specializing in statistics and probability, he suffered the indignity of having his nomination for a Rosenwald Fellowship at the Institute for Advanced Studies at Princeton University rejected for racial reasons. In 1918, Elmer Samuel Imes received a doctorate in physics from the University of Michigan, where his studies focused on quantum theory as applied to the rotational states of molecules. As space technology evolved, Imes’s research proved highly significant for scientists in the United States’ space program. After chemist Percy Julian received a doctorate from the University of Vienna in 1931, he returned to the United States and, working out of the Julian Research Institute that he established in Illinois, developed technologies for creating synthetic substitutes for expensive drugs. His research greatly influenced the development of generic drugs in the United States. As the fields of science and technology have grown increasingly complex, achievements in those fields have more often been team rather than individual efforts. Numerous African Americans have been members of teams that gained considerable recognition in subjects such as laser research, supersonic flight, particle science, and solid state technology. Marc Hannah captured an enviable place in the production of three-dimension special effects that are widely used in film. His work on Terminator 2, Aladdin, and Jurassic Park received many enthusiastic accolades.

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One can list notable accomplishments by many other African Americans in the sciences. African American oncologist Isaac Powell has done pioneering research in prostate cancer. Jill Bargonetti, an African American biologist, has studied a specific gene that quells tumors and targets them for destruction. Geophysicist Waverly Person has engaged in innovative seismological research on earthquakes. His efforts gained him the directorship of the National Earthquake Information Center of the United States Geological Survey. Meredith Gourdine, an Olympic athlete with a doctorate from the California Institute of Technology, although blinded by diabetes, has devised technologies to produce electricity from chemical and thermal energy. He holds over seventy patents for his inventions. Robert Lawrence was the first African American to become an astronaut but died in a training accident in 1967. In 1983, Guion Blueford became the first African American to orbit the earth; three years later, Ronald McNair became the second. Bernard Harris, a physician, served as a specialist on the STS-55 space mission of 1993 and in 1995 became the first African American to walk in space. Enticing African Americans into the Sciences During the days of segregation, black secondary school students were often counseled to avoid the hard sciences and mathematics. In the twenty-first century, emphasis is on enticing them into those fields. The ranks of African American college graduates with science and mathematics majors are growing steadily. The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) and private employers such as Bell Laboratories and the Howard Hughes Medical Institute employ many African American scientists. Because enrollments of African Americans in medical school dropped precipitously during the 1960’s and 1970’s, the Association of American Medical Colleges in 1991 sponsored Project 3000 by 2000, aimed at graduating three thousand minority medical students, most of them African American, by the year 2000. This program was a notable success. The American Dental Association has launched a program that emphasizes the dental needs of African Americans.

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The National Action Council for Minorities in Engineering sponsors a mentoring program to encourage minorities to study engineering. This program begins working with minority youth as early as fourth grade and has attracted nearly five thousand minority students, mostly African Americans, into engineering programs throughout the nation. African American scientists have been instrumental in helping increase the emphasis on science in the secondary schools of the United States. Efforts such as Ruth Wright Hayre’s “Tell Them We Are Rising” project makes it possible for impoverished African American youths finally to attend college and gain entry into the professions. R. Baird Shuman Further Reading Kessler, James H., J. S. Kidd, Renee A. Kidd, and Katherine A. Morin. Distinguished African American Scientists of the Twentieth Century. Phoenix: Oryx Press, 1996. Among the most comprehensive considerations of African American contributions to twentieth century science and technology. Krapp, Kristine, ed. Notable Black American Scientists. Detroit: Gale Group, 1999. Accurate and worthwhile overview of African American contributions to science. Mabunda, L. Mpho. The African American Almanac. 7th ed. Detroit: Gale Group, 1997. A twenty-four-page section on science and technology provides broad coverage and illustrations. Spangenburg, Ray, and Kit Moser. African Americans in Science, Math, and Invention. New York: Facts On File, 2003. Excellent resource that contains 161 biographical sketches of African Americans who gained prominence in scientific areas. Webster, Raymond B. African American Firsts in Science and Technology. Detroit: Gale Group, 1999. The author lists chronologically significant African American contributions in eight technical fields. See also Agriculture; Black colleges and universities; Education; Talented Tenth; United Negro College Fund

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Scott v. Sandford The Case: U.S. Supreme Court ruling on slavery and citizenship Date: March 6-7, 1857 The U.S. Supreme Court ruled that Congress could not limit slavery in the territories, nullifying the Missouri Compromise. In 1834, Dred Scott, a slave of African descent, was taken by his owner, John Emerson, an army surgeon, to the free state of Illinois and then to Wisconsin Territory, which was free by the provisions of the Missouri Compromise of 1820. Emerson returned to Missouri with Scott in 1838. After Emerson’s death in 1846, Scott sued Mrs. Emerson in the Missouri courts for his freedom, on the grounds of his residence in a free state and later in a free territory. Although he won in the lower court, the state supreme court reversed the decision in 1852 and declared that Scott was still a slave because of his voluntary return to Missouri. During this litigation, Mrs. Emerson remarried and, under Missouri law, the administration of her first husband’s estate passed to her brother, John F. A. Sanford. (Sanford’s name was misspelled when the suit was filed.) Because Sanford was a citizen of New York, Scott’s lawyer, acting on the grounds that the litigants were residents of different states, sued for Scott’s freedom in the U.S. circuit court in Missouri. The verdict there also went against Scott. The Supreme Court’s Ruling The case was appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court, where it was argued in February, 1856, and reargued in January, 1857. For a variety of reasons, the Supreme Court justices determined to deal with the controversial questions of African American citizenship and congressional power over slavery in the territories. The Supreme Court announced its decision on March 6, 1857. Although each of the nine justices issued a separate opinion, a majority of the Supreme Court held that African Americans who were descendants of slaves could not belong to the political community created by the Constitution and enjoy the right of federal citizenship; and that the Missouri Compromise of 1820, forbidding slavery in the part of the Louisiana Purchase territory north

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of 36° north latitude, was unconstitutional. According to the opinion of Chief Justice Roger B. Taney, African Americans were “beings of an inferior order” who “had no rights which the white man was bound to respect.” Taney’s comments established a perception of African Americans that transcended their status as slaves. In considering the issue of equality, Justice Taney did not limit his assessment of African Americans to those who were slaves, but also included African Americans who were free. Taney’s opinion raises questions about the extent to which this precept of the inferiority of African Americans helped to establish conditions for the future of race relations in the United States. Although individual states might grant citizenship to African Americans, state action did not give African Americans citizenship under the federal Constitution. Therefore, concluded Taney, “Dred Scott was not a citizen of Missouri within the meaning of the Constitution of the United States, and not entitled as such to sue in its courts.” Taney also declared that, since slaves were property, under the Fifth Amendment to the Constitution—which prohibited Congress from taking property without due process of law— Congress had only the power and duty to protect the slaveholders’ rights. Therefore, the Missouri Compromise law was unconstitutional. This part of Taney’s opinion was unnecessary, an obiter dictum, for, having decided that no African American could become a citizen within the meaning of the Constitution, there was no need for the Supreme Court to consider the question of whether Congress could exclude slavery from the territories of the United States. Reaction The nation reacted strongly to the Supreme Court’s decision. The South was delighted, for a majority of the justices had supported the extreme southern position. All federal territories were now legally opened to slavery, and Congress was obliged to protect the slaveholders’ possession of their chattel. The free-soil platform of the Republicans was unconstitutional. The Republicans denounced the decision in the most violent terms, as the product of an incompetent and partisan body. They declared that

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when they obtained control of the national government, they would change the membership of the Supreme Court and secure reversal of the decision. Northern Democrats, while not attacking the Supreme Court, were discouraged by the decision, for if Congress could not prohibit slavery in any territory, neither could a territorial legislature, a mere creation of Congress. Therefore, popular sovereignty also would cease to be a valid way of deciding whether a federal territory should be slave or free. John G. Clark Updated by K. Sue Jewell Further Reading Paul Finkelman’s Dred Scott v. Sandford: A Brief History with Documents (Boston: Bedford Books, 1997), Don Edward Fehrenbacher’s The Dred Scott Case: Its Significance in American Law and Politics (New York: Oxford University Press, 1978), and Walter Ehrlich’s They Have No Rights: Dred Scott’s Struggle for Freedom (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1979) take a closer look at the famous case. Charles Morrow Wilson’s The Dred Scott Decision (Philadelphia: Auerbach, 1973) combines a biography of Dred Scott with descriptions of the court cases and appeals. Derrick Bell’s Faces at the Bottom of the Well: The Permanence of Racism (New York: Basic Books, 1992) employs literary models in addressing the issue of how African Americans experience racial injustice in the judicial system in the United States. Bell’s Race, Racism, and American Law (2d ed., Boston: Little, Brown, 1980), presents a comprehensive analysis of U.S. law that asserts that racial inequality is integrated into the legislative and judicial system in the United States. K. Sue Jewell’s From Mammy to Miss America and Beyond: Cultural Images and the Shaping of U.S. Social Policy (New York: Routledge, 1993) discusses how institutional policies and practices in the United States contribute to social inequality for African Americans in general, and African American women in particular. Black Americans and the Supreme Court Since Emancipation: Betrayal or Protection? (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1972), edited by Arnold Paul, explores precedent-setting Supreme Court cases that reveal the Court’s failure to ensure equal rights for African Americans.

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See also Civil Rights Acts of 1866-1875; Civil War; Fugitive Slave Law of 1850; Kansas-Nebraska Act; Missouri Compromise; Proslavery argument; Slavery; Slavery and the justice system; Thirteenth Amendment

Scottsboro trials The Event: Trials of nine young American American men on trumped-up charges of rape Date: 1931-1937 Place: Scottsboro, Alabama The 1930’s trials of nine young African Americans for rape mirrored both entrenched southern bigotry and antiliberal sentiments. On March 25, 1931, nine young African Americans were pulled off a freight train in Scottsboro, Alabama, after an alleged fight with a group of white youths. As the African Americans were being rounded up by sheriff’s deputies, two women riders told onlookers that they had been raped by the entire group. Within a month, the boys were tried in Scottsboro, and eight of them were convicted and sentenced to death; the case of the youngest boy, only thirteen years of age, was declared a mistrial. Because of the speed of the convictions, the questionable nature of much of the testimony, and the hostile atmosphere in which the trial had been held, the case soon attracted widespread attention. Both the International Labor Defense (ILD), an arm of the Communist Party, and the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) expressed concern about the possibility of injustice and launched an appeal for a new trial. The boys and their parents chose the ILD to manage their defense. The Retrials In Powell v. Alabama (1932), the U.S. Supreme Court overruled the convictions and sent the cases back to a lower court. There followed another series of trials in Decatur, Alabama, beginning in March, 1933, and lasting until December. This time, only three of the boys were tried, all of whom received convictions and death

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sentences, but the Supreme Court sustained an appeal that irregularities in the selection of jurors invalidated the verdicts. The specific irregularity was that the voting rolls showed no African Americans registered to vote in that county, in spite of a large population of qualified African Americans. In January, 1936, a third group of trials, held in Decatur, resulted in the conviction of Haywood Patterson, who was sentenced to seventy-five years’ imprisonment. After more than a year of delay and behind-the-scenes negotiations between Alabama officials and a group of the defendants’ supporters, the remaining eight were tried in the summer of 1937. One received the death penalty, three were sentenced to long prison terms, and the four others were released without charges. Although the one death sentence was later commuted to life imprisonment, the five convicted Scottsboro boys were unable to obtain a reversal. One was paroled in 1943, two more in 1946, and a fourth in 1950. The final prisoner escaped from a work gang in 1948 and managed to

African Americans demonstrating outside the White House in 1933 to protest the unfair treatment accorded to the Scottsboro defendants by the justice system. (National Archives)

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reach Michigan, from where the governor refused to extradite him. The former defendant quickly found himself in trouble, committing a murder and being sentenced to Michigan’s worst prison. Most observers outside Alabama and an increasingly large number of people within the state came to believe that the defendants were innocent and were, therefore, the victims of southern racial injustice. One of the two women accusers, Ruby Bates, had retracted her testimony by 1934 and admitted that she had lied in her original accusations. The other, a prostitute named Victoria Price, presented testimony so full of contradictions that one of the judges in the 1933 trials, Alabamian James E. Horton, overruled the jury’s guilty verdict and declared a mistrial. At least one of the defendants was ruled physically incapable of rape, and a physician testified that a medical examination of Bates and Price, performed shortly after the presumed attack, did not support their claims. Although both women were found to have had recent sexual intercourse, there were no contusions or other injuries that would have matched their stories about brutality at the hands of the nine men. None of this had any appreciable effect on the juries, the prosecutors, or Judge William W. Callahan, who presided after Horton was removed from the case. Even the milder sentences meted out in 1937 resulted as much from a desire to end the unfavorable publicity surrounding the trials as from any reevaluation of the evidence. Repercussions Besides serving as a symbol of southern bigotry, the Scottsboro trials attracted attention because of the efforts of the Communist Party to identify the cause of the defendants with their own. Working through the ILD, the Communist Party was one of the first groups to protest the verdicts in the 1931 trials, and it was the only group to offer direct aid at that time. For several years, it engaged in a running battle with the NAACP and an “American Scottsboro Committee” over the right to manage the boys’ defense. The effect of these struggles was to unite many Alabamians against all “reds and foreigners” and make it more difficult to revise the verdicts.

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The chief defense counsel after 1931 was Samuel Leibowitz, a Jewish attorney from New York who became the target of attacks from the prosecutors. Even he, along with Judge Callahan and part of the Alabama press, came to regard the communist support as a liability and sought to dissociate the ILD from the case. In 1935, the NAACP, the American Civil Liberties Union, and the ILD joined to form the Scottsboro Defense Committee (SDC), designed to coordinate support for the defendants and to seek cooperation from moderate Alabamians. Although the ILD played a much smaller role in the case from that point on, there remained enough hostility toward outside interference in Alabama to frustrate the SDC’s efforts. The Scottsboro case mirrored many of the important social currents of the 1930’s. While illustrating the extent to which white southerners would go to defend a system of white supremacy, it also marked a change from the not too distant era when the defendants might well have been summarily lynched. The hysterical attitude with which many Alabamians reacted to outside interest in the case underlined a regional insecurity that had been intensified by the unsettled conditions of the Depression. It was common for both men and women to hop onto freight trains, which the nine men had done, as had the two alleged victims. The Scottsboro boys had gotten into a fight with several white men. In Scottsboro and Decatur, race was on trial, not nine boys and men, much to the lasting chagrin of the state of Alabama. In 1976, the Alabama Board of Pardons and Paroles granted Clarence Norris a full pardon. Courtney B. Ross Updated by John Jacob Further Reading Dan T. Carter’s Scottsboro: A Tragedy of the American South (Rev. ed., Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1979) analyzes the trials and treatment of the nine African Americans and discusses the impact of the events on the South. Allan Knight Chalmers’s They Shall Be Free (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1951) is an account of the Scottsboro trials from the perspective of one of the defense attorneys who also argued before the Supreme

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Court. In Clarence Norris and Sybil D. Washington’s The Last of the Scottsboro Boys (New York: Putnam, 1979), the last and most literate of the defendants presents his case. Haywood Patterson and Earl Conrad’s Scottsboro Boy (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1950) is the first book to shed personal light on the plight of the nine. See also Lynching

Segregation Definition: Physical separation of people based on their race or ethnic identity Segregation of members of minorities in the United States was a negative social and economic practice that kept the country from achieving “liberty, freedom, and equality,” promises upon which the nation was founded; the practice consigned millions of people to secondclass citizenship. American segregation was born in the colonial era, when the “majority” practiced de facto segregation. When most African Americans were slaves, free blacks suffered de facto segregation in housing and social segregation based on custom and folkways. As the northern colonies abolished slavery, de facto segregation sometimes became de jure separation supported by local ordinances and/or state law. As long as the South maintained slavery, that institution regulated race relations, and de jure segregation was not needed. In 1865, however, the southern slaves were set free and legal segregation made its appearance. After the Civil War, most southern states passed legislation known as black codes, which resembled the old slave codes. Under the new codes, social segregation was often spelled out. For example, most states moved immediately to segregate public transportation lines. By the end of Reconstruction (1866-1877), race lines had hardened, and social segregation was the rule rather than the exception.

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Unsuccessful Challenges Some African Americans challenged segregationist laws. In 1896, blacks from Louisiana sued a public transportation company (railroad) that operated segregated passenger cars, as stipulated by Louisiana’s state laws. Black leaders argued that the state laws and the railroad’s actions violated the Thirteenth and Fourteenth Amendments to the Constitution. The case, Plessy v. Ferguson, reached the U.S. Supreme Court, which ruled that segregation was legal as long as “separate but equal” facilities were made available for members of minorities. A lone dissenter, Justice John M. Harlan, who happened to be a white southerner, rejected the majority opinion, saying that the Constitution should be “colorblind” and that it should not tolerate “classes” among the citizens, who were all equal. Despite Harlan’s dissent, the Plessy decision gave absolute legal sanction to a practice that many states, including some in the North, were already practicing by custom and tradition—Plessy froze segregation into the highest law of the land. Thereafter, segregationists, especially those in the South, used their legislatures to pass a host of new laws that extended the supposed “separate but equal” doctrine to all areas of life. For example, restaurants, hotels, and theaters became segregated by law, not only by custom. Railroad cars and railroad stations divided the races; hospitals, doctors’ offices, and even cemeteries became segregated. Some southern state laws called for segregated prisons, while prisons in other states took criminals from both races but separated them within the facility. At least one state passed a law that forbade a white and a black prisoner to look out the same prison window at the same time. If the prisoners were physically close enough to look out at the same time, they were too close to please segregationists. As the United States matured during the twentieth century, segregation was extended to whenever technology made it seem necessary. For example, in 1915, Oklahoma became the first state in the Union to require segregated public pay telephone booths. When motor cars were first used as a taxi service, taxi companies were segregated—a “white” taxi serving whites only and a “black” taxi serving African Americans only.

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Public water fountains became segregated, as did public restroom facilities. Another problem became associated with segregation. Often, there was no separate facility for blacks, who were denied service altogether. For example, as late as the 1960’s, President Lyndon B. Johnson’s personal maid and butler-handyman experienced difficulty traveling by car from Washington, D.C., back to Johnson’s Texas home. There were few if any motels along the way that would rent rooms to African Americans. Successful Challenges Eventually, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) launched new attacks against segregationist laws—especially in circumstances in which no separate facilities existed for African Americans. For example, in Gaines v. Missouri (1938) and Sweatt v. Painter (1949; a Texas case), the Supreme Court ruled that blacks could attend white law schools because no separate school was available in state for African Americans. In 1950, in McLaurin v. Oklahoma, the NAACP tested the same concept and won another court battle. As McLaurin showed, the University of Oklahoma had admitted a black student to its graduate program but then had segregated him on campus. After the Supreme Court ruled that such segregation was unfair and illegal because it denied equal education, Thurgood Marshall of the NAACP became even more determined to challenge segregation. He did so successfully when, in Brown v. Board of Education (1954), the Court declared segregated public education illegal. If segregation was unjust and unconstitutional in education, it seemed clear that it was also unjust in other areas of life. In 1955, under the leadership of Martin Luther King, Jr., and others, a nonviolent protest movement took to the streets and eventually won victories that included new laws such as the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voter Registration Act of 1965. Ultimately, a limited social and economic revolution occurred that condemned segregation and, in part, created a new American society. James Smallwood

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Further Reading Segregation and its consequences are discussed in Bob Blauner’s Racial Oppression in America (New York: Harper & Row, 1972); Taylor Branch’s Parting the Waters: America in the King Years, 1954-1963 (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1988); Joe R. Feagin and Clairece B. Feagin’s Racial and Ethnic Relations (5th ed., Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1996); James Forman’s The Making of Black Revolutionaries (2d ed., Washington, D.C.: Open Hand, 1985); Fred Powledge’s Free at Last? The Civil Rights Movement and the People Who Made It (Boston: Little, Brown, 1991); and Harvard Sitkoff’s The Struggle for Black Equality, 1954-1992 (New York: Hill & Wang, 1993). See also Alexander v. Holmes County Board of Education; Baseball’s integration; Black codes; Bolling v. Sharpe; Brown v. Board of Education; Civil Rights movement and children; Cooper v. Aaron; Evans v. Abney; Green v. County School Board of New Kent County; Heart of Atlanta Motel v. United States; Integration; Jim Crow laws; Jones v. Alfred H. Mayer Company; Keyes v. Denver School District No. 1; McLaurin v. Oklahoma State Regents for Higher Education; Milliken v. Bradley; Missouri ex rel. Gaines v. Canada; Orangeburg massacre; Palmer v. Thompson; Plessy v. Ferguson; Restrictive covenants; Segregation; Segregation on the frontier; Separate but equal doctrine; Shelley v. Kraemer; Slavery; Sports; Sweatt v. Painter

Segregation on the frontier Definition: Several thousand African Americans moved to the American West in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in an effort to escape the racism that existed in the eastern United States Once on the frontier, African Americans established segregated communities that allowed them to live apart from whites who would discriminate against them. Most people who have studied the western frontier have found that racial discrimination existed there, but that it was different

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from that found in the former slave states in the southeastern United States. For example, some western territories and states passed statutes requiring segregation of the races in schools and other public facilities, but these laws were not enforced as vigorously as in the South. Incidents of racial violence (such as white mobs lynching African Americans) were less numerous on the frontier than they were east of the Mississippi River. Still, racism did exist on the frontier, and African Americans sought to avoid it. Even before the Civil War (1861-1865), free blacks established segregated communities in isolated areas of Arkansas, Louisiana, and Texas. After the war, African Americans who had been slaves to Native Americans created several all-black towns and agricultural colonies in Indian Territory. Other African Americans availed themselves of the provisions of the Homestead Act (1862), which allowed them to claim 160-acre parcels of public land on the frontier. Many of these black homesteaders created segregated communities where they could live by their own rules rather than those imposed upon them by white Americans. All-Black Communities Several of the all-black settlements were towns in which all of the businesses were owned by African Americans. Others were

Migrants on their way from Mississippi to Kansas in 1897. (Library of Congress)

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agricultural colonies whose residents expected to earn their living primarily by farming. In reality, however, the distinction between the two types of communities often became blurred. The farmers needed businesses to supply some of their needs, and the business owners often farmed to make extra money. Consequently, many of the segregated frontier communities were small urban areas surrounded by farms. Perhaps the most famous all-black frontier settlement was Nicodemus, Kansas. A few promoters of an all-black settlement chose a spot on the western Kansas prairie to establish Nicodemus. They filed homestead claims and mapped out town lots on part of their land. They then went back east to make speeches and distribute brochures encouraging people to move to the proposed town. The promoters then charged the recruits fees for helping them move to Kansas and for filing their homestead papers. The Nicodemus settlers established churches, schools, and various social organizations to improve their quality of life. This attempt to create a sense of community was essential in making the colonists feel content in strange surroundings. As the people became friends with their neighbors and worked to help one another succeed, the sense of community began to grow and to become stronger. This sense of community was one of the main reasons that African Americans chose to live in segregated settlements on the frontier. However, while the sense of community was strong in Nicodemus and other all-black frontier colonies, other factors caused most of them to fail. The frontier environment was such that droughts often led to crop failures, which sometimes caused residents to grow disillusioned and move elsewhere to farm. A second problem was that many of the settlers lacked the capital to obtain enough animals, supplies, and equipment to make farming successful. This, of course, had an adverse effect on the businesses that relied on the farmers’ patronage. Many businesses went broke, and African American farmers often had to work for nearby whites in order to eke out a living from the harsh frontier land. Eventually, many inhabitants of all-black communities abandoned their claims and moved into or near towns where whites also lived.

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Members of the Shores family, who became famous as musicians in Nebraska in the late nineteenth century. (Nebraska State Historical Society)

Black Neighborhoods in White Communities Even in these larger, predominantly white settlements, African Americans usually segregated themselves. Many frontier towns had a neighborhood where African Americans lived and socialized, creating a black community within the larger, whitecontrolled community. In these situations, African Americans experienced social segregation while participating in an integrated business environment that allowed them to benefit from their more prosperous white neighbors. Some African Americans worked as hired hands and domestic servants for white families, and others ran restaurants, hotels, barbershops, laundries, repair shops, and other businesses that catered to customers of all races. Laws and customs of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries dictated that the social contact between black and white people be limited. This was true in the American West just as it was in the older eastern sections of the country. However, a relatively low level of prejudice on the western frontier allowed for much business activity between the races. Thus, although African Americans on the western frontier usually lived in segregated communities, their lives were more prosperous and suc-

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cessful when they engaged in commerce with their white neighbors. Roger D. Hardaway Further Reading Norman L. Crockett discusses four all-black frontier towns (Nicodemus, Kansas, and Boley, Clearview, and Langston, Oklahoma) in The Black Towns (Lawrence: Regents Press of Kansas, 1979). Kenneth Marvin Hamilton examines Nicodemus, Boley, Langston, and Allensworth, California, in Black Towns and Profit: Promotion and Development in the Trans-Appalachian West, 18771915 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1991). Black communities in predominantly white towns are the subject of Thomas C. Cox’s Blacks in Topeka, Kansas, 1865-1915: A Social History (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1982) and of William L. Lang’s “The Nearly Forgotten Blacks on Last Chance Gulch, 1900-1912,” in Pacific Northwest Quarterly (70, 1979). A general survey of the various types of western black settlements is Roger D. Hardaway’s “African American Communities on the Western Frontier,” in Communities in the American West, edited by Stephen Tchudi (Reno: Nevada Humanities Committee and University of Nevada Press, 1999). See also Cowboys; Segregation

Selma-Montgomery march The Event: Demonstration to protest the lack of voting rights for African Americans in the South Date: March, 1965 Place: Selma to Montgomery, Alabama The march from Selma to Montgomery had a significant impact on passage of the 1965 Voting Rights Act and marked an increased emphasis in civil rights reform upon political and economic issues. The Selma to Montgomery March of 1965 is often viewed as one of the most decisive events in the history of the American Civil

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Rights movement. It was marked by considerable violent resistance, a high degree of emotional intensity for those who participated, and political impact not often matched. Its basic purpose was to extend voting rights to black Americans in a period when many southern white leaders adamantly resisted broadening the franchise. The Civil Rights Act signed by President Lyndon B. Johnson on July 2, 1964, did contain provisions for minority voting rights. The Civil Rights Act’s eleven titles spanned the spectrum of basic rights, including equal access to public accommodations, schools, and employment. Title VI gave the federal government the power to cut off funds to state or local authorities that discriminated, but there was little increased authority in the voting rights provisions of Title I. Nor was it certain that any of the desegregation mandates would be respected in the Deep South. SNCC and SCLC Involvement Although Selma was a small city in an essentially rural part of Alabama, it was in the highly segregated Dallas County region that some civil rights leaders believed would be a good place to launch a concerted voter registration drive. In February, 1963, well before the 1964 Civil Rights Act, Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) field workers such as Bernard and Colia Lafayette, John Love, Worth Long, and others began to work with local black leaders. The results were meager because of intense resistance by the forces of Sheriff James G. Clark and the entrenched white power structure. On the other hand, Clark’s roughness provided the kind of focus needed to stir a grassroots movement. Throughout 1963 and 1964, SNCC and the Dallas County Voters’ League held monthly voter registration clinics and occasional mass rallies. Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) organizers such as James Bevel, C. T. Vivian, Harry Boyte, and Eric Kindberg participated in some of these activities and began to consider the Dallas County area as a possible target for the SCLC’s heightened voter registration drive begun in earnest after the Civil Rights Act.

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If voter registration was the chief focus of Dallas County black leaders such as Albert Turner, Amelia Boynton, and Voters’ League president Frederick D. Reese, it was by no means the only issue. There was widespread concern among African Americans about police roughness, barriers to school integration, and widespread poverty because of job discrimination. They believed that gaining the vote would open the door to other reforms in the local communities. The Johnson administration had already introduced a voting rights act in Congress by late 1964, but passage was uncertain and some of its terms were considered weak by the SCLC, SNCC, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), and other advocacy groups. Martin Luther King, Jr., the SCLC’s president, shared these concerns and came into Selma in January, 1965, to spur the voter registration effort. King met forceful resistance, as did several others. He was slightly injured when a white detractor attacked him as he tried to integrate Hotel Albert. On January 19, 1965, Sheriff Clark roughly shoved Mrs. Amelia Boynton as she participated in a march to the courthouse on behalf of black voter registration. That incident was pictured in the national and international media and drew the world’s attention to Selma, a city in south central Alabama with fewer than thirty thousand residents. It became obvious that voting rights were tied to other basic American constitutional rights. When King, by then a Nobel Peace Prize recipient, was jailed in early February, a new wave of activists poured into Selma to give aid to the effort. Many of them were students, but ministers, workers, and others were also attracted to the increasingly dramatic Selma campaign. Even Malcolm X, just days before his assassination on February 21 in Harlem, went to Selma to support King. The fatal shooting of young Jimmie Lee Jackson by police in nearby Marion added to the determination to continue the voting rights drive and the effort to deal with the various violations of rights that African Americans faced. The original plan for a motorcade from Selma to Montgomery was abandoned in favor of a walking demonstration along the rural highway leading to the state’s capital. This brought to light a complex pattern of racial

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segregation that reached all the way to the governor’s office and state laws. The First March Begins The first effort to march from Selma to Montgomery was made on Sunday, March 7, 1965. King and Ralph Abernathy were at their churches preaching. The SCLC’s Hosea Williams and SNCC chairman John Lewis led a crowd of more than five hundred people out of Brown Chapel to the Edmund Pettus Bridge and toward Montgomery, along Highway 80. Governor George Wallace had banned the march the previous day, and Clark was expected to try to stop it, but no one anticipated the military-like force that waited to confront the marchers. Across the bridge, a large volunteer posse put together by Sheriff Clark waited, along with wellequipped state troopers under Colonel Albert Lingo. As the marchers approached the bridge, they were ordered to stop and told to disband within two minutes. Before the short warning period had ended, the police began to attack. Some were on horseback, swinging billy clubs and whips that lashed into the marchers’ bodies. Tear gas canisters were fired as the crowd began to scatter. Some troopers pursued the fleeing demonstrators as they tried to find refuge. The Selma march had suddenly become a rout that would be remembered as “Bloody Sunday” by many people. About eighty injured people were treated at the Good Samaritan Hospital, seventeen of whom were admitted for more treatment and observation. The “Bloody Sunday” attack was publicized widely, both in the United States and abroad. King rushed back to the city and prepared for another attempt on Tuesday. March 9, appealing for help from around the nation. Public concern deepened, and within two days about 450 white members of the clergy and a wave of other supporters poured into Selma. This time, a federal injunction prohibited the march, and President Johnson requested a postponement. Local Selma and Dallas County officials disagreed on how to approach any renewed effort to march to Montgomery. Public Safety Director Wilson Baker had opposed the use of force against the first attempted march, and now he urged compromise to avoid a repeti-

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tion of its violence. Behind the scenes, federal and local officials worked with King and other leaders to arrange a symbolic march across the Edmund Pettus Bridge, with promises that police would let marchers pass. The march would then halt without continuing to Montgomery. Few people knew of these arrangements, however, so that the March 9 trek caused confusion and some disillusionment. A crowd of about nine hundred people left Brown Chapel once again. The number swelled to more than fifteen hundred as they neared the bridge. King told them, “We must let them know that nothing can stop us, not even death itself.” Most assumed that they were on their way to the capital. As the marchers crossed the bridge, the police lines widened to let them pass. The marchers paused to sing “We Shall Overcome,” and then the march leaders turned the group around and headed back into town. Aftermath Despite this ostensible retreat, the events in Selma were important in the history of civil rights activism in the United States. The week following the second attempted march was filled with significant legal and political moves. A federal court declared the Alabama bans on demonstrations invalid, and President Johnson spoke out forcefully to Congress and the nation on March 15 in support of the effort in Selma. He declared what had happened on March 7 to be “an American tragedy,” and said that the Selma campaign was important to all Americans. In Johnson’s words, “Their cause must be our cause, too.” No president had ever taken this bold a public stand on civil rights. The fact that Johnson ended his address by saying, “And we shall overcome!” won wide applause from black activists. On March 17, 1965, Judge Frank M. Johnson authorized the march to Montgomery and ordered Governor Wallace not to interfere. The same day, President Johnson sent his completed voting rights bill to Congress. Certain restrictions were placed on the march, such as a limit of three hundred on the number of marchers on two-lane sections of the road, but it would proceed with police protection to its destination. About eight thousand people started out of Selma on Sunday, March 21. It took five days to

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complete the trip. Along the way, a number of prominent entertainers and political figures participated, among them Harry Belafonte and Leonard Bernstein. King left on Wednesday, March 24, to fly to Cleveland for a speech, but rejoined the march as it entered Montgomery on Thursday. About thirty thousand people had taken part in the march. There were some violent eruptions in places, but the march proceeded in an orderly way without major incident. After the march, however, a white Michigan housewife and mother, Mrs. Viola Liuzzo, was shot to death in her car as she drove black marchers back home from Montgomery. When the SCLC board of directors met in Baltimore in early April, 1965, they considered a boycott campaign against the state of Alabama in response to that and other violence. Impact The Selma march has a significant place in civil rights history. It helped to convince Congress that a voting rights act was necessary. Such a bill was passed by Congress in May, 1965, and signed into law by President Johnson on August 6. It covered all states where screening devices such as literacy tests were used to restrict voting and states in which either fewer than half of the voting-age citizens were registered as of November 1, 1964, or fewer than 50 percent voted in the 1964 presidential election. In another major sense, this march was historically significant. After Selma, the Civil Rights movement gave more attention to the socioeconomic conditions of members of racial minorities and poor people in the United States. It seemed imperative after 1965 to exercise the right to vote and thereby seek to bring about some of the reforms that were impossible when black Americans were systematically prohibited from voting. The Selma march was also psychologically important. It boosted confidence and energized new enthusiasm for future changes. King biographer Stephen B. Oates concluded that, “In truth, Selma was the movement’s finest hour, was King’s finest hour.” There is much truth in this estimation. The Selma experience not only effected political changes but also infused the movement with a new confidence. Some scholars see in it the culmination of

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the trend from nonviolent persuasion to nonviolent coercion, that is, the transition from using marches and other demonstrations to win support to using them to bring higher legal and political authority to bear on local opposition. This distinction is not absolute since, from the beginning, both elements were present. At the personal level, Selma is remembered as an inspirational experience. Marchers were resisted violently, yet they persisted. Many children and young people who witnessed the March 7 confrontation recalled years later being helped to safety by the adults. Voter registration efforts, furthermore, were thereafter regarded by increasing numbers of individuals as important direct action contributions to social reform in the United States. After Selma, the nonviolent Civil Rights movement in the United States began to venture out of the South into places such as Chicago, Cleveland, and Louisville. Thomas R. Peake Further Reading Fager, Charles E. Selma, 1965. New York: Scribner’s, 1974. Written by a white participant who knew the black leaders involved in the Selma march, this account provides useful insight into the dynamics of the surrounding politics. Fager discusses the tensions between Sheriff James Clark and Police Chief Wilson Baker as well as the differences among Voters’ League president Frederick D. Reese and various other voter registration campaign leaders. The book also provides valuable information on the alleged sexual misconduct of participants and shows that this was mostly a myth. Fager also traces the background of the march, its details, and its immediate results. Contains illustrations and an index, as well as some guides to sources. Garrow, David J. Protest at Selma: Martin Luther King, Jr., and the Voting Rights Act of 1965. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1978. The most thorough account of the background and development of the Selma campaign. Garrow draws upon a rich array of sources to trace methodically the work of SNCC, the Dallas County Voters’ League, and local politics to show the importance of the Selma experience in forcing Con-

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gress to act on the Johnson administration’s voting rights proposals. Garrow’s account is a solid, basic study of the campaign and its effects. Contains elaborate notes and index. Lewis, John with Michael D’Orso. Walking with the Wind: A Memoir of the Movement. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1998. Oates, Stephen B. Let the Trumpet Sound: The Life of Martin Luther King, Jr. New York: Harper & Row, 1982. The first of the critical analyses of King’s life. Oates presents little that is new, but he does take more seriously the charge of King’s personal misconduct with women. His treatment of Selma is among the best parts of the book in the sense of capturing both the drama and the significance of the anti-integrationist violence that produced “Bloody Sunday” on March 7, 1965. Contains notes, bibliographical references, and index. Webb, Sheyann, and Rachel West Nelson. Selma, Lord, Selma: Girlhood Memories of the Civil Rights Days. University: University of Alabama Press, 1980. A moving personal account by two women who were small children during the Selma campaign. Part of a growing genre of personal literature that is enriching civil rights studies, this work is warmly presented, very readable, and highly informative on the experience of young blacks during the intense period of civil rights activism. Fears, expectations, and personal views are presented in a refreshing way. Wolk, Allan. The Presidency and Black Civil Rights: Eisenhower to Nixon. Madison, N.J.: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1971. Although not specifically about the Selma campaign, Wolk’s study puts the Johnson Administration in perspective, showing the evolution of the relationship between presidential politics and civil rights issues from the 1950’s to the early 1970’s. Its chief value in this connection is its information on Johnson’s much higher level of involvement in civil rights than any other president of the period covered. Contains a chronological chart of civil rights policies, a selected bibliography, and an index. See also Birmingham March; Million Man March; Million Woman March; Poor People’s March on Washington

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Separate but equal doctrine Definition: Proposition that equal protection of all citizens under the law as guaranteed by the Fourteenth Amendment is not threatened by social segregation of the races, so long as members of all groups are treated equally A concept that originated in a U.S. Supreme Court ruling in an 1896 case, the separate but equal doctrine legalized the practice of segregating public and private facilities and services by race, which was particularly common in the southern states. In Plessy v. Ferguson (1896), the Supreme Court made a distinction between political rights, which are protected under the Constitution, and social conditions, which are not legally protected. It held that social conditions related to race, such as segregation, were natural, inevitable, and not necessarily an indication of the inferiority or superiority of one race over another. This ruling reflected the federal government’s growing willingness during the late nineteenth century to strike a compromise with the South on the issue of freed slaves’ rights as citizens. The federal government’s desire to gain the full participation of the former Confederate states in the Union affected its attitude toward segregation and other racial issues. The separate but equal doctrine negatively affected the legal gains made by African Americans during the early Reconstruction period after the Civil War. The Court’s ruling in Plessy legitimized the state laws establishing and enforcing racial segregation, known as Jim Crow laws, that proliferated throughout the South beginning in the 1880’s. Whites-only and blacks-only neighborhoods were upheld as socially and legally correct. Transportation in all its forms—railroad cars, steamships, and buses— was likewise segregated. Separate facilities or entrances for whites and African Americans to such public and private places as schools, churches, restaurants, libraries, hotels, public parks, healthcare centers, and theaters became commonplace. Even water fountains, public restrooms, waiting areas, and public telephones became designated as either for whites or African Americans.

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The social segregation of the races led to the firm entrenchment of a separate but unequal social system. Consequently, the social distance between whites and African Americans that had existed during slavery was maintained, although with new norms and practices. This system had a tremendous impact on generations to follow, both in terms of people’s attitudes toward members of minorities and in the opportunities African Americans were able to pursue. The separate but equal doctrine was not reversed until 1954 in Brown v. Board of Education. Pamela D. Haldeman Further Reading Kromkowski, John A., ed. Race and Ethnic Relations. Guilford, Conn.: Dushkin/Brown & Benchmark, 1996. Schuman, Howard, Charlotte Steeh, Lawrence Bobo, and Maria Krysan. Racial Attitudes in America: Trends and Interpretations. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1997. Weinstein, Allen, and Frank Otto Gatell. The Segregation Era, 18631954: A Modern Reader. New York: Oxford University Press, 1970. See also Brown v. Board of Education; Louisville, New Orleans, and Texas Railway Company v. Mississippi; McLaurin v. Oklahoma State Regents for Higher Education; Missouri ex rel. Gaines v. Canada; Plessy v. Ferguson; Reconstruction; Segregation

Sharecropping Definition: System in which African Americans farmed on whiteowned land, paying for the privilege with shares of their crops During the half century following the abolition of slavery in the South, sharecropping provided landless former slaves with meager incomes, while helping to keep the South’s ruined economy going. In the aftermath of the American Civil War (1861-1865), the South faced many difficulties. Its cities, factories, and railroads had been shattered, and its valuable agricultural industry had been turned upside down. Many large planters lost their entire work-

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force when the Thirteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution freed southern slaves. Newly freed slaves, most of whom were farmworkers, had no land to cultivate. Landowners, former slaves, and small farmers negotiated a compromise: sharecropping. The system they created would eventually lead to a steady decline in southern agriculture during the twentieth century. Deeply in debt after the war, many southern landowners were forced to give up all or fragments of their property to local merchants, banks, and corporations. By the end of Reconstruction (1863-1877), large portions of southern farmland were controlled by absentee landlords who neither lived on nor worked their land but managed it from afar. Southern landowners had a large number of acres to be planted and not enough money to hire farm laborers. At the same time, thousands of African Americans were free from slavery but without the homes, land, or tools they needed to support themselves. To earn a living, agricultural laborers agreed to become tenants on farmland. Landlords provided tenants with land, a small house, and tools to grow a crop. Tenants worked the land and

A sharecropping family returning home after spending their morning working on a North Carolina tobacco farm in 1939. (Library of Congress)

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promised a percentage of their annual crop yield, usually between 20 percent and 50 percent, to the landlord. Landlords frequently arranged credit for tenants with local merchants to help them establish a household and buy seed. Storekeepers and landowners, who sometimes were the same person, placed liens on the farmers’ crops to protect their interests. Tenants hoped to yield enough profit from their labor not only to pay off their liens but also to eventually purchase the land they worked. A bad year or depressed cotton prices could easily leave many farmers in debt at the end of the season. Sharecroppers frequently promised an additional percentage of their crop to local merchants to purchase the next year’s seed and feed their families through the winter. Year after year, sharecroppers became more indebted. Forced to work until liens were paid, tenants became bound to their land, continually impoverished and with little hope of becoming property owners. Sharecropping in the South increased steadily in the latter half of the nineteenth century until approximately 75 percent of all southern farmers were sharecroppers. Cotton prices began to drop after the turn of the century and then fell drastically during the Great Depression of the 1930’s. These conditions forced thousands of tenants to leave the land and move to northern cities in search of employment. Others were forced to leave when landlords decided farming was no longer profitable. As a result of this loss of labor and increases in technology, sharecropping represented only a small percentage of farming in the South by the end of the twentieth century. Leslie Stricker See also Agriculture; Employment; Great Migration; Reconstruction

Shaw v. Hunt The Case: U.S. Supreme Court ruling on gerrymandering to create “majority-minority” districts Date: June 13, 1996

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In this decision, the Supreme Court held that the equal protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment prohibits the drawing of irregularly shaped congressional districts designed to produce electoral majorities of racial and ethnic minorities. One of the purposes of the Voting Rights Act of 1982 was to protect members of racial and ethnic minorities from vote dilution. After the census of 1990, the Department of Justice interpreted the act to mean that legislatures must adopt reapportionment plans that included, whenever possible, congressional districts with heavy concentrations of racial and ethnic minorities. Some of the resulting race-conscious districts were spread out and highly irregular in shape. In the election of 1992, these new districts helped elect an unprecedented number of African Americans to Congress. In North Carolina, there were two race-based districts, with one following a narrow strip of land for 160 miles. Ruth Shaw and other white voters of North Carolina filed suit, claiming that these two voting districts violated their rights under the equal protection clause. In Shaw v. Reno (1993), the Supreme Court directed the federal district court to reconsider the reapportionment plan according to the strict scrutiny standard. This decision, often called Shaw I, clearly indicated that a majority of the justices did not approve of racial gerrymandering. The lower court, nevertheless, approved the districts. In Shaw v. Hunt (also known as Shaw II), the Supreme Court reversed the lower court’s judgment. Speaking for a majority of five, Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist noted that any law that classifies citizens on the basis of race is constitutionally suspect and concluded that the drawing of the two contested districts had not been narrowly tailored to further a compelling state interest. He insisted that the state’s interest in remedying the effects of past or present racial discrimination must be justified by an “identified past discrimination” rather than simply a generalized assertion of such discrimination. Also, he argued that the Justice Department’s policy of maximizing majority-black districts was not authorized by the Voting Rights Act, which said nothing about subordinating the traditional districting factors of com-

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pactness, contiguity, and respect for political subdivisions. Justice John Paul Stevens wrote a strong dissent, arguing that the white plaintiffs’ claims of harm were “rooted in speculative and stereotypical assumptions.” In two closely related decisions, Bush v. Vera (1996) and Abrams v. Johnson (1997), the Court struck down race-based congressional districts in Texas and Georgia respectively. Each of these decisions was decided by a 5-4 vote, which meant that a future change in Court personnel could result in a different judgment about the controversial issue of racial gerrymandering. Thomas Tandy Lewis See also Gerrymandering; Shaw v. Reno; Voting Rights Act of 1975

Shaw v. Reno The Case: U.S. Supreme Court ruling on gerrymandering Date: June 28, 1993 By calling for close scrutiny of a predominantly black congressional district whose shape it considered “bizarre,” the Supreme Court in Shaw v. Reno struck a blow against the practice of drawing district boundaries to create “majority-minority” electoral districts. After the 1990 census, the state legislature of North Carolina began the task of “reapportionment,” or redrawing its electoral districts. Although about 22 percent of the state’s population was African American, no African Americans had been elected to Congress for almost a century. To remedy this, and ostensibly to meet provisions of the Voting Rights Act, the legislature created two majority-nonwhite districts. In order to avoid disturbing incumbents’ districts, the legislature drew one of the two districts largely along an interstate highway, snaking 160 miles through the north-central part of the state. The resulting district was 53 percent black. Five voters filed suit against the reapportionment plan, objecting that the race-based district violated their right to participate in a nonracial electoral process. The case reached the

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Supreme Court, whose 5-4 majority instructed the lower courts to reconsider the constitutionality of such a district in the light of its “bizarre” shape and its “uncomfortable resemblance to political apartheid.” In essence, the majority expressed its concern about the practice of creating districts on the basis of race and of establishing contorted geographical boundaries. The coupling of the two practices presumably could result in districts that patently violated the Constitution’s equal protection clause, unless a compelling state interest could be demonstrated. When the Shaw case was subsequently returned to North Carolina, a federal panel upheld the reapportionment plan after finding that the state did indeed have a compelling interest in complying with the Voting Rights Act. Nevertheless, the Supreme Court’s Shaw decision has been the basis for other important decisions concerning racially defined districts. In 1994, for example, a majority-black district in Louisiana was rejected by a federal district court invoking Shaw. The court expressed particular concern that the district was intentionally created on the basis of the voters’ race. More significant, in 1995 the U.S. Supreme Court extended Shaw’s admonitions about racial reapportionment to argue that voters’ rights are violated whenever “race was the predominant factor motivating the legislature’s decision to place a significant number of voters within or without a particular district,” irrespective of shape. Shaw served as a watershed in the contest between advocates of racial representation and those who champion a “color-blind” electoral system. It came at a time when various racial issues that had for years remained largely outside sharp political debate— affirmative action, welfare reform, and so forth—had been thrust into the center stage of American political discourse. Although Shaw by no means resolved these debates, it helped to delineate the battle lines. Steve D. Boilard See also Shaw v. Hunt; Voting Rights Act of 1965

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Shelley v. Kraemer The Case: U.S. Supreme Court ruling on restrictive covenants in housing Date: May 3, 1948 Although it allowed private individuals to make racially restrictive covenants, this ruling meant that such covenants were worthless because they could not be legally enforced. After J. D. Shelley, an African American, purchased a house in a predominantly white neighborhood of St. Louis, Missouri, one of the neighbors, Louis Kraemer, sought and obtained an injunction preventing Shelley from taking possession of the property. Unknown to Shelley, the neighboring landowners had signed a contractual agreement barring owners from selling their property to members of “the Negro or Mongolian race.” Supported by the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), Shelley challenged the constitutionality of the contract in state court, but the Missouri Supreme Court upheld its legality. Appealing to the U.S. Supreme Court, Shelley’s case was argued by the NAACP’s leading counsels, Charles Houston and Thurgood Marshall. President Harry S. Truman put the weight of the executive branch in favor of the NAACP’s position. This was not the first time that the issue of residential segregation had appeared before the Court. In Buchanan v. Warley (1917), the Court had struck down state statutes that limited the right of property owners to sell property to a person of another race, but in Corrigan v. Buckley (1926) the Court upheld the right of individuals to make “private” contracts to maintain segregation. Corrigan was based on the establishment principle that the first section of the Fourteenth Amendment inhibited the actions of state governments, not those of individuals. The Court refused to declare restrictive contracts unconstitutional, but it held 6-0 that the Fourteenth Amendment’s equal protection clause prohibited state courts from enforcing the contracts, meaning that the contracts were not enforceable. The decision, written by Chief Justice Fred Vinson, emphasized that one

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of the basic objectives of the Fourteenth Amendment was to prohibit the states from using race to discriminate “in the enjoyment of property rights.” The decision did not directly overturn Corrigan, but it interpreted the precedent as involving only the validity of private contracts, not their legal enforcement. In a companion case five years later, Barrows v. Jackson (1953), Chief Justice Vinson dissented when the majority used the Shelley rationale to block enforcement of restrictive covenants through private damage suits against covenant violators. Eliminating the last direct method for legally barring African Americans from neighborhoods, Shelley was an important early victory in the struggle against state-supported segregation. Civil rights proponents hoped that a logical extension of the case would lead to an abolition of the distinction between private and state action in matters of equal protection, but in later decisions such as Moose Lodge v. Irvis (1972), the majority of judges were not ready to rule against private conduct that was simply tolerated by the state. Thomas Tandy Lewis See also Buchanan v. Warley; Burton v. Wilmington Parking Authority; Civil Rights Act of 1968; Civil Rights movement; Fair Housing Act; Heart of Atlanta Motel v. United States; Jones v. Alfred H. Mayer Company; Moose Lodge v. Irvis; Patterson v. McLean Credit Union; Restrictive covenants; Segregation

Simpson murder trial The Event: Criminal trial of former foootball star and media personality O. J. Simpson, who was charged with the murder of his former wife and another person Date: 1994-1995 The criminal murder trial and acquittal of former football star O. J. Simpson polarized racial attitudes about American criminal justice and police racism. Both before and after the trial, most whites thought Simpson was guilty, and most African Americans thought he was innocent.

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On the night of June 12-13, 1994, the slashed and stabbed bodies of Nicole Brown Simpson and her friend Ronald Goldman, both white, were discovered outside the Los Angeles condominium of Nicole Simpson. After making a preliminary investigation, police left the crime scene and went to the nearby Brentwood estate of Nicole Simpson’s former husband, O. J. Simpson, the African American former football star. Finding blood on the door of a white Ford Bronco parked askew on the street in front of the house, Los Angeles Police Department detective Mark Fuhrman climbed the fence without a warrant, allegedly to protect Simpson from any possible danger, and admitted other detectives to the premises. Simpson was not at home, but Fuhrman, who had been at the Simpson residence five years earlier to answer a domestic violence complaint, used the opportunity to search for evidence linking Simpson to the murder. A bloody glove he allegedly found behind the guest quarters later became a key factor in the trial. When Simpson returned from Chicago, where he had flown the evening of the murder, he quickly became the only suspect in the case. After a bizarre low-speed vehicle chase watched by millions on live television, Simpson surrendered to police on June 17. Denied bail, he remained in jail during the lengthy trial. He used his wealth to hire a “dream team” of famous attorneys. Jury selection began in September, 1994, and took most of the fall. The Trial What the media dubbed the “trial of the century” began in late January, 1995, under Judge Lance Ito with a heavily sequestered jury of mostly African Americans. Shortly afterward, O. J. Simpson’s self-exonerating book I Want to Tell You was published, the first of dozens of books about the case. Gavel-to-gavel coverage on Cable News Network (CNN) guaranteed continuous public attention, and the rest of the electronic and print media rapidly followed suit. Prosecutors Marcia Clark and Christopher Darden began with a case emphasizing the history of domestic violence in the Simpsons’ stormy marriage, but they soon shifted to an emphasis on

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DNA (deoxyribonucleic acid) evidence linking the blood of O. J. Simpson and both victims to physical evidence found at the crime scene and the Brentwood estate. This made Detective Fuhrman a key witness, along with his partner Detective Philip Vannatter. Another key witness from the Los Angeles Police Department was Dennis Fung from the crime lab, who admitted under cross-examination that some of the blood evidence had been processed by a trainee, Andrea Mazzola. The most damaging cross-examination was that of Fuhrman by defense attorney F. Lee Bailey, who scathingly portrayed Fuhrman as a bigoted racist and perjurer who denied his own racist statements and actions despite several witnesses to the contrary. Vannatter was also portrayed as a racist because of his association with Fuhrman and was accused of mishandling blood samples before turning them over to the crime lab. These and various other defense accusations of police misconduct and conspiracy left sufficient doubts in the minds of jurors, and they acquitted Simpson of both murders after only a brief deliberation on October 3, 1995. The passionate summation by defense attorney Johnnie Cochran made it quite clear to both the jury and the general public that the alleged racism and misbehavior of Fuhrman and the rest of the Los Angeles Police Department were more important elements in the case than either DNA evidence or domestic violence, thus alienating Cochran from Simpson’s other principal attorney, Robert Shapiro. The cast of characters made race an obvious factor in the trial from the very beginning. Simpson, Darden, and Cochran were African Americans, as were nine of the jurors. The detectives, the other attorneys, and both victims were white. Judge Ito was a Japanese American married to a white police captain. Near the end of the trial, surveys conducted by CBS News found that 64 percent of whites surveyed thought that Simpson was guilty, while 59 percent of African Americans thought that he was not guilty. Only 11 percent of whites surveyed thought Simpson was not guilty, and only 12 percent of African Americans thought he was guilty. Only about one-fourth of each group was undecided, and the disparity of perceptions between the races had actually increased during the trial.

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Reactions to the Trial After the verdict was announced, many African Americans rejoiced and treated the outcome as if it were a conviction of the Los Angeles Police Department on charges of racism and conspiracy to frame Simpson. This response should be viewed in the light of the highly publicized 1991 Los Angeles beating of African American motorist Rodney King by white police officers, four of whom were acquitted of state criminal charges, leading to massive racially motivated rioting in Los Angeles, but two of whom were later convicted of federal criminal charges. Meanwhile many white people expressed their dismay at the Simpson acquittal and asserted that a combination of Simpson’s money and reverse jury bias had led to a serious miscarriage of justice. These feelings were not greatly diminished sixteen months later when Simpson was held liable for the deaths of the two victims in a civil lawsuit and assessed punitive damages of $25 million, which compares interestingly with the nearly $20 million that the criminal trial cost both sides. Explanations of the Verdict Various explanations have been put forward to account for Simpson’s acquittal in the criminal trial. They include reasonable doubt, the lack of a specific theory of the crime, jury nullification, and “evidence” of a police conspiracy. The simplest explanation is that the jurors did not find persuasive evidence of Simpson’s guilt and followed the judge’s instructions to acquit the defendant if there was not proof beyond a reasonable doubt. Many African Americans hold this view and give the jury credit for a job well done despite the brevity of their deliberations. A somewhat more complex version of this explanation is that the prosecution never advanced a specific theory of the crime. For example, they asserted throughout the trial that Simpson committed the entire crime by himself despite circumstantial evidence that an unknown accomplice may have been involved before, after, or during the murders. Some African Americans may have felt that this was condescending or patronizing to the jury and therefore have given jury members credit for realizing that a

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more complex theory might make better sense of the known facts. Simpson’s DNA fairly clearly placed him at the crime scene on the night in question, but to this day, there is no specific scenario for the crime. Many whites feel that some jury nullification of crucial evidence must have occurred to produce such a speedy acquittal. Very little of the evidence handled by Fuhrman and Vannatter was formally excluded by Judge Ito, and it was left up to the jurors to decide what weight to give each item of evidence. In the belief that evidence obtained through biased procedures by racist police officers ought not to count against the African American defendant, it would be quite conceivable for nullificationist jurors to neglect the entirety of the evidence found at the Brentwood estate and some of the evidence found at the crime scene. Many whites clearly felt that this was exactly what happened, so the jury may have neglected part of its job. A further twist on this argument is that a police conspiracy was involved and that key pieces of evidence such as a bloody glove and a bloody sock found in the bedroom were planted by overzealous officers to incriminate Simpson. Cochran’s very controversial summation encouraged this viewpoint, and many African Americans, including some of the jurors, may have agreed. However, most whites did not agree even if they thought Simpson was not guilty. This was probably the most divisive outcome of the trial, because despite Simpson’s acquittal, it tended to reaffirm racially polarized opinions about the extent of previously alleged inequities toward members of minorities in the U.S. criminal justice system. Tom Cook Further Reading Tapes from the Cable News Network (CNN) are crucial to a thorough study of the trial. However, more succinct analyses can be found in Vincent Bugliosi’s Outrage: The Five Reasons Why O. J. Simpson Got Away with Murder (New York: W. W. Norton, 1996), Alan M. Dershowitz’s Reasonable Doubts: The O. J. Simpson Case and the Criminal Justice System (New York: Simon & Schuster,

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1996), and Frank Schmalleger’s The Trial of the Century: The People of the State of California vs. Orenthal James Simpson (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1996). See also King beating case; Los Angeles riots

Sit-ins Definition: Nonviolent civil rights protest tactic in which African Americans occupied seats in “white-only” restaurants and lunch counters while politely requesting service An important part of the fight against racial segregation in the South, sit-ins were an effective form of protest that helped to dramatize the Civil Rights movement. On February 1, 1960, four African American college students entered a Greensboro, North Carolina, Woolworth’s and sat at the lunch counter. They were refused service because they were not white, but they remained seated until closing as an act of protest. In the following weeks, others who opposed “whites only” food service policies sat at Greensboro lunch counters for hours at a time. Six months later, the city’s lunch counters were open to both African American and white patrons. This form of nonviolent protest came to be known as a “sit-in.” Sit-ins were an important part of the Civil Rights movement. Early in 1960, the technique quickly spread from Greensboro to other areas of the South. Typically, well-dressed African Americans, occasionally accompanied by white people, sat at segregated lunch counters from opening until closing. Despite their own peacefulness, protesters were sometimes physically abused or arrested. Eventually, stores lost money because of the disturbances and were forced to comply with protesters’ demands. Sitins became the most effective tool for lunch counter desegregation across the South. In a broader sense, sit-in victories brought African Americans one step closer to equality. Robert D. Lukens

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Further Reading For more information on the development and impact of sitins, consult Miles Wolf’s Lunch at the 5 & 10 (1990) and Martin Oppenheimer’s The Sit-in Movement of 1960 (1989). See also Chicago sit-ins; Civil Rights movement; Greensboro sit-ins

Slaughterhouse Cases The Case: U.S. Supreme Court ruling on the Civil War amendments Date: April 14, 1873 In these cases, the U.S. Supreme Court for the first time interpreted the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments and upheld a state statute granting monopoly status to a corporation. Although the case had no direct bearing on African Americans, its interpretation of the Civil War amendments would have important ramifications for later Supreme Court decisions regarding African American civil rights. In 1869, the state of Louisiana created a corporation and gave it monopoly status to operate a meat-slaughtering facility south of the city of New Orleans. It prohibited all other slaughterhouse operations in the three parishes surrounding the city. The goal of the law was to remove slaughterhouse operations from areas that polluted Mississippi River water traveling through the city and consolidate them at one central location downstream from the city. The law also regulated the prices charged for use of the facility by butchers. Butchers not included in the monopoly claimed the law was unconstitutional under the recently adopted Thirteenth and Fourteenth Amendments to the U.S. Constitution. The Louisiana Supreme Court affirmed the law, and the case was appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court. Justice Samuel F. Miller, writing for the five-member majority of the Court, upheld the law. He used the case to reflect on the purpose of the three Reconstruction-era amendments to the

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U.S. Constitution, the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments which had been ratified between 1865 and 1870. He wrote that the three taken together were intended to end slavery and the effects of slavery on African Americans. This portion of the opinion is important, as it reflects contemporaneous thinking on the rationale for the ratification of the three amendments. Justice Miller rejected the claim that granting a monopoly to the corporation created an “involuntary servitude” in violation of the Thirteenth Amendment, noting that the amendment intended to apply narrowly to the incidents of slavery. He also refused to find that the state of Louisiana had violated the Fourteenth Amendment protection of the “privileges and immunities of citizens of the United States” by awarding the monopoly. He refused to give the Fourteenth Amendment a broad interpretation or permit the concept of due process to be used to challenge state law through the U.S. Constitution. The four-member minority opinion authored by Justice Stephen J. Field sharply disagreed with the majority. Justice Field wrote that the Fourteenth Amendment protects a broad array of privileges and immunities from state interference. Justice Joseph P. Bradley wrote a second dissenting opinion asserting that the Fourteenth Amendment due process clause requires that persons be protected from state actions and that the clause should be given a broad interpretation. This minority view later gained support by the Court majority in the use of substantive due process to limit state regulation of economic activities. It also has been used as a source to protect fundamental rights such as the right to privacy and in criminal law. Further Reading Labb, Ronald M., and Jonathan Lurie. The Slaughterhouse Cases: Regulation, Reconstruction, and the Fourteenth Amendment. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2003. See also Civil War; Compromise of 1877; Reconstruction

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Slave codes Definition: Colonial and state laws dealing with slavery In slave-holding states, slave codes were used to make slavery an institution; in free states, such as Ohio, they were used to discourage African Americans from moving to the free states. The first colonial laws recognizing and institutionalizing slavery were enacted in Virginia in the mid-seventeenth century. A similar series of Ohio laws denying civil rights to African Americans were enacted to discourage black immigration to that state in the early nineteenth century. Virginia In March, 1661, the Virginia General Assembly declared that “all children borne in this country shalbe held bond or free only according to the condition of the mother.” Enacted to alleviate confusion about the status of children with English fathers and African mothers, this law was the first in a series recognizing perpetual slavery in Virginia and equating “freedom” with “white” and “enslaved” with “black.” This law is especially indicative of the hardening of race relations in mid-seventeenth century Virginia society, as status in the patriarchal society of England traditionally was inherited from the father. By reversing this legal concept, perpetuation of enslavement for African Americans was ensured for their children, whether of black or white ancestry. Despite the extent to which the 1661 law narrowed the options for defining Africans’ status, this act did not in itself establish slavery. Africans had two available windows through which they could obtain freedom—conversion to Christianity and manumission (formal emancipation). In 1655, mulatto Elizabeth Key brought a successful suit for her freedom, using as her main argument the fact that she had been baptized. In 1667, a slave named Fernando contended that he ought to be freed because he was a Christian and had lived in England for several years. Not only did the court deny Fernando’s appeal, but also that same year the General Assembly took another step toward more clearly defining the status of African Americans, by declaring “that the con-

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ferring of baptisme doth not alter the condition of the person as to his bondage or freedome.” Planters felt that if baptism led to freedom, they would be without any assurance that they could retain their slave property. The 1667 law thereby built on the earlier one to define who would be a slave, and was clarified in 1670 and again in 1682, when the Assembly declared that any nonChristian brought into the colony, either by land or by sea, would be a slave for life, even if he or she later converted. In 1691, colonial leaders provided a negative incentive to masters wishing to free their slaves by declaring that anyone who set free any “negro or mulatto” would be required to pay the costs of transporting the freedmen out of the colony within six months. Although manumissions still occurred and some free blacks managed to remain in the colony, the primary status for African Americans in Virginia was that of chattel. Although who was to be a slave in Virginia had now been defined, it had yet to be determined precisely what being a slave meant on a daily basis for Africans and their descendants. Between 1661 and 1705, nearly twenty separate laws were passed limiting, defining, and prescribing the rights, status, and treatment of African Americans. In general, these laws were designed to protect planters’ slave property and to protect the order and stability of white society from an “alien and savage race.” The piecemeal establishment of slavery in these separate laws culminated in 1705 in a comprehensive slave code in Virginia. This code reenacted and strengthened a number of earlier slave laws, added further restrictions and harsher punishments, and permanently drew the color line that placed African Americans at the bottom of Virginia society. Whites were prohibited from trading with, having sexual relations with, and marrying African Americans. African Americans were forbidden to own Christian servants “except of their own complexion,” leave their home plantation without a pass, own a gun or other weapon, or resist whites in any way. Many of the harsher penalties for slave crimes, for example, the death penalty and maiming, were not carried out nearly as frequently as the laws suggest, because doing so would harm or destroy the master’s property. Laws prohibiting slaves from trad-

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Slaves chained together while being relocated. (Library of Congress)

ing or hiring themselves out were disregarded almost routinely. The disadvantage for slaves of this lack of enforcement was that laws prohibiting cruel treatment or defining acceptable levels of correction often were ignored as well. Where abuse was blatant, action against white offenders was taken only reluctantly, and punishments were insignificant and rare. Generally, laws in the economic and political interest of the white planter elite were enforced and respected; laws that restrained planters’ pursuits were not. Ohio and the Northwest Territory The Northwest Territory was established in 1787 and ultimately became the states of Ohio, Indiana, Michigan, Illinois, and Wisconsin. In 1800, what was to become the state of Ohio separated from the rest of the territory. Two years later, Ohio elected

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delegates to a constitutional convention in preparation for a statehood petition, which was approved in 1803. Although the Northwest Ordinance prohibited slavery in that territory, Ohio’s constitutional convention debated the issue during its sessions. With the slaveholding states of Virginia on Ohio’s eastern boundary and Kentucky on its southern boundary, there was considerable pressure for Ohio to recognize slavery. Many of the immigrants to Ohio came from slave states and saw nothing evil in the system. While many southern Ohioans did not object to slavery, persons in the northern part of the state were more likely to oppose it. Delegates at the 1802 constitutional convention debated several questions that focused on African Americans. There was no strong feeling for instituting slavery in Ohio; there was, however, strong opinion in favor of limited rights for African Americans. After a major debate over allowing African Americans to vote, it was decided not to delete the word “white” from the qualifications for the franchise. Nevertheless, the African American population grew from five hundred in 1800 to nearly two thousand by 1810. In 1804, the legislature debated and passed the first of the “Black Laws,” statutes intended to discourage African Americans from moving into Ohio and to encourage those already there to leave. A few years later, an even stronger bill to restrict African Americans was presented in the Senate. In its final version, it forbade African Americans from settling in Ohio unless they could present a five-hundred-dollar bond and an affidavit signed by two white men that attested to their good character. Fines for helping a fugitive slave were doubled. Finally, no African American could testify against a white in court. However restrictive the original Black Laws were, the new law was far worse. African Americans were stripped of legal protection and placed at the mercy of whites. Whites did not need to fear being tried for offenses against African Americans unless there was a white witness who would testify. There is evidence of at least one African American being murdered by whites, with only African American witnesses to the crime. African American witnesses could not provide evidence against a white assailant.

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Even if a case went to court, it would be heard by an all-white jury before a white judge. African American victims could not testify on their own behalf, because of the restrictions against providing testimony against whites. Because they could not vote, African Americans could neither change nor protest these laws. While the black codes of 1804 and 1807 were enforced only infrequently, they still were the law and were a constant reminder that African Americans in Ohio had only the barest minimum of human and civil rights—and those rights existed only at the whim of white society. The laws fell into disuse and finally were repealed in 1849, long after the abolitionist movement, with its western center located in Oberlin, Ohio, was well under way, and long after the Underground Railroad had opened several stations in Ohio. Laura A. Croghan Duncan R. Jamieson Further Reading Joseph Boskin’s Into Slavery: Racial Decisions in the Virginia Colony (Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott, 1976) provides an account of the evolution of perpetual slavery and a representative selection of relevant primary documents. In the Matter of Color: Race and the American Legal Process, the Colonial Period (New York: Oxford University Press, 1978), by A. Leon Higginbotham, Jr., recounts the events culminating in the legal recognition of slavery in the British mainland colonies. Philip J. Schwartz’s Twice Condemned: Slaves and the Criminal Laws of Virginia, 1705-1865 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1988) uses criminal trial records to examine slave resistance and whites’ efforts to control threatening slave behavior. Robert B. Shaw’s A Legal History of Slavery in the United States (Potsdam, N.Y.: Northern Press, 1991) illustrates the history of slavery in terms of its legislative and judicial background, from settlement through emancipation. Charles Jay Wilson’s “The Negro in Early Ohio” (Ohio Archeological and Historical Quarterly 39, 1930) is the most complete analysis of Ohio’s Black Laws. See also Abolition; Antislavery laws of 1777 and 1807; Black codes; Fugitive Slave Law of 1793; Fugitive Slave Law of 1850;

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Missouri Compromise; New York City slave revolt; Slavery and families; Slavery and the justice system; Slavery and women; Slavery in Massachusetts; Slavery in Virginia; Underground Railroad

Slavery Slavery has historically constituted a significant denial of human rights and, as practiced in the United States, laid the foundations for conflict between whites and African Americans for generations to come. Slavery is one of the oldest institutions of human society. Slavery was present in the earliest human civilizations, those of ancient Mesopotamia and Egypt, and continued to exist in several parts of the world through the late twentieth century. Despite the near universality of slavery, there is no consensus regarding what distinctive practices constitute slavery. In Western society, a slave typically was a person who was owned as property by another person and forced to perform labor for the owner. This definition, however, breaks down when applied to non-Western forms of slavery. In some African societies, slaves were not owned as property by an individual but were thought of as belonging to a kinship group. The slave could be sold, but so too could nonslave members of the kinship group. In certain African societies, slaves were exempted from labor and were used solely to bring honor to the master by demonstrating his absolute power over another person. Sociologist Orlando Patterson suggested that slavery is best understood as an institution designed to increase the power of the master or the ruling group. Slaves can fulfill this role by laboring to make the master rich, but they can also do so by bringing honor to the master. One of the defining, universal characteristics of slavery is that the slave ceases to exist as a socially meaningful person. The slave relates to society only through the master. Slavery includes many mechanisms to remove the slave from membership in any groups, such as the family, through which the slave might derive an independent sense of identity. By placing

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the master in a dominant position over another individual, slavery is believed to increase the honor and power of the master. The slave’s status is permanent and it is typically passed down to the slave’s children. Slavery in World History The use of slavery was widespread in the ancient world, especially in Greece and Italy. During the classical ages of Greek and Roman society, slaves constituted about one-third of the population. Following the collapse of the Roman Empire in Western Europe during the fifth and sixth centuries, declining economic conditions destroyed the profitability of slavery and provided employers with large numbers of impoverished peasants who could be employed more cheaply than slaves. Over the next seven hundred years, slavery slowly gave way to serfdom. Although serfs, like slaves, were unfree laborers, serfs generally had more legal rights and a higher social standing than slaves. Familiarity with the institution of slavery did not, however, disappear in Western Europe. A trickle of slaves from Eastern Europe and even from Africa continued to flow into England, France, and Germany. Western Europeans retained their familiarity with large-scale slave systems through contacts with southern Italy, Spain, and Portugal, and with the Byzantine Empire and the Muslim world, where slavery flourished. Western Europeans also inherited from their Roman forebears the corpus of Roman law, with its elaborate slave code. During the later Middle Ages, Europeans who were familiar with Muslim sugar plantations in the Near East sought to begin sugar production with slave labor on the islands of the Mediterranean. Thus, as Western Europe entered the age of exploration and colonization, Europeans had an intimate knowledge of slavery and a ready-made code of laws to govern slaves. During the sixteenth century, as European nations sought to establish silver mines and sugar plantations in their new colonies in the Western Hemisphere, heavy labor demands led to efforts to enslave Native Americans. This supply of laborers was inadequate because of the rapid decline of the Indian population following the introduction of European diseases into the Western Hemisphere. The

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Drawing of early African slaves arriving on the shores of the New World. (Library of Congress)

Spanish and Portuguese then turned to Africa, next most readily available source of slave laborers. Between 1500 and 1900, European slave traders imported 9.7 million African laborers into the Western Hemisphere. Every European colony eventually used slave labor, which became the principal form of labor in the Western Hemisphere. Because the wealth of several modern nations was created by slave labor, some contemporary African Americans have claimed the right to receive reparations payments from nations such as the United States, which continue to enjoy the wealth accumulated originally by the use of slave laborers. Slavery and Race The large-scale use of African slaves by European masters raised new moral issues regarding race. There is no necessary connection between slavery and race. A massive survey by Orlando Patterson of slave societies throughout history found that in three-quarters of slave societies, masters and slaves were of the same race. Slavery in the Western Hemisphere was unusual in human history because slaves were drawn almost exclusively from the black race. In most colonies of the Western Hemisphere, the use of African slaves was accompanied by the rise of racism, which some scholars claim was a new, unprecedented phenomenon caused by

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slavery. Scholars seeking to understand contemporary race relations in the United States have been intrigued by the rise of prejudice in new slave societies. Did Europeans enslave Africans merely because they needed slaves and Africa was the most accessible source of slaves? If so, then prejudice probably originated as a learned association between race and subservience. Modern prejudice might be broken down through integration and affirmative action programs aimed at helping whites to witness the success of African Americans in positions of authority. Did Europeans enslave Africans because they saw Africans as inferior persons ideally suited for slavery? If so, then contemporary racism is a deeply rooted cultural phenomenon that is not likely to disappear for generations to come. African Americans will receive justice only if the government establishes permanent compensatory programs aimed at equalizing power between the races. Historical research has not resolved these issues. Sixteenth century Europeans apparently did view Africans as inferior beings, even before the colonization of the Western Hemisphere. These racial antipathies were minor, however, in comparison to modern racism. Emancipated slaves in recently settled colonies experienced little racial discrimination. The experience of slavery apparently increased the European settlers’ sense of racial superiority over Africans. After the slave systems of the Western Hemisphere became fully developed, racial arguments became the foundation of the proslavery argument. Supporters of slavery claimed that persons of African descent were so degraded and inferior to whites that it would be dangerous for society to release the slaves from the control of a master. In the United States, some proslavery theorists pushed the racial argument to extreme levels. In explaining the contradiction between slavery and the American ideal that all persons should be free, writers such as Josiah Nott and Samuel Cartwright claimed that African Americans were not fully human and, therefore, did not deserve all the rights belonging to humanity. A minority of proslavery writers rejected the racial argument and the effort to reconcile slavery and American egalitarian ide-

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als. Writers such as George Fitzhugh claimed that all societies were organized hierarchically by classes and that slavery was the most benevolent system for organizing an unequal class structure. Slavery bound together masters and slaves through a system of mutual rights and obligations. Unlike the “wage slaves” of industrial society, chattel slaves had certain access to food, clothing, shelter, and medical care, all because the master’s ownership of the slaves’ bodies made him diligent in caring for his property. Slavery was depicted by some proslavery theorists as the ideal condition for the white working class. The Antislavery Movement From the dawning of human history until the middle of the eighteenth century, few persons appear to have questioned the morality of slavery as an institution. Although some persons had earlier raised moral objections to certain features of slavery, almost no one appears to have questioned the overall morality of slavery as a system before the middle of the eighteenth century. Around 1750, however, an antislavery movement began to appear in Britain, France, and America.

Alexandria, Virginia, slave dealer’s headquarters, around the 1850’s. (National Archives)

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The sudden rise of antislavery opinion appears to be related to the rise of a humanitarian ethos during the Enlightenment that encouraged people to consider the welfare of humans beyond their kin groups. The rise of the antislavery movement was also related to the growing popularity of new forms of evangelical and pietistic religious sects such as the Baptists, Methodists, and Quakers, which tended to view slaveholding as sinful materialism and slaves as persons worthy of God’s love. The rise of the antislavery movement was encouraged by the American and French Revolutions, whose democratic political philosophies promoted a belief in the equality of individuals. The rise of antislavery opinion also coincided in time with the rise of industrial capitalism. The historian Eric Williams argued in Capitalism and Slavery (1944) that the economic and class interests of industrial capitalists rather than the moral scruples of humanitarians gave rise to the antislavery movement. Antislavery activism initially focused on the abolition of the Atlantic slave trade. Reformers succeeded in prompting Britain and the United States to abolish the slave trade in 1807. Other nations followed this lead over the next half century until the Atlantic slave trade was virtually eliminated. The campaign to abolish the slave trade achieved early success because it joined together moral concerns and self-interest. Many persons in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries were prepared to accept the end of the slave trade while opposing the end of slavery itself. Even slaveholders were angered by the living conditions endured by slaves on crowded, disease-infested slave ships. Some masters, in fact, attempted to justify their ownership of slaves by claiming that the conditions on their plantations were more humane than the conditions on slave-trading ships or in allegedly primitive Africa. Some slaveholders supported the abolition of the slave trade because they realized that limiting the supply of new slaves from Africa would increase the value of the existing slave population. Finally, many persons believed that it was wrong for slave traders to deny liberty to freeborn Africans, but that it was not wrong for slave masters to exercise control over persons who were born into the status of slavery. Indeed, supporters of slavery argued that

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the well-being of society required masters to exercise control over persons who had no preparation for freedom and might be a threat to society if emancipated. The campaign to eradicate slavery itself was more difficult and was accompanied by significant political upheavals and, in the case of Haiti and the United States, revolution and warfare. British reformers such as William Wilberforce, Thomas Clarkson, and Granville Sharp made, perhaps, the most significant contributions to the organization of a worldwide antislavery movement. In 1823, British activists formed the London Antislavery Committee, soon to be renamed the British and Foreign Antislavery Society. The society spearheaded a successful campaign to abolish slavery in the British Empire and, eventually, worldwide. It remained in existence in the 1990’s. Known by the name Antislavery International, the society had the distinction of being the world’s oldest human rights organization. Antislavery reformers were also active in the United States. From the 1830’s through the 1860’s, abolitionists such as William Lloyd Garrison, Wendell Phillips, and Frederick Douglass sought to arouse the moral anger of Americans against slavery. More effective, however, were politicians such as Abraham Lincoln, Charles Sumner, and Salmon P. Chase, whose antislavery message was a mixture of idealism, self-interest, and expedience. Emancipation of Slaves Beginning in the late eighteenth century and accelerating through the nineteenth century, slavery was abolished throughout the Western Hemisphere. This was followed in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries by the legal abolition of slavery in Africa and Asia. In evaluating the success of abolition in any society, it is necessary to distinguish between legal and de facto emancipation. Changing the legal status of a slave to that of a free person is not the same thing as freeing the slave from the control of a master. Legal emancipation often has little impact on persons held as slaves if governments fail to enforce the abolition of slavery. For example, Britain in the nineteenth century outlawed slavery in its colonies in India, the Gold Coast, Kenya, and Zanzibar. Yet, fear-

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Dates of Legal Emancipation in the United States State

Year

State

Year

Alabama

1863-1865

Missouri

1865

Arkansas

1863-1865

New Hampshire

1783

California

1850

New Jersey

1804

Connecticut

1784

New York

1799

Delaware

1865

North Carolina

1863-1865

Florida

1863-1865

Ohio

1787

Georgia

1863-1865

Oklahoma

1866

Illinois

1787

Oregon

1846

Indiana

1787

Pennsylvania

1780

Iowa

1820

Rhode Island

1784

Kansas

1861

South Carolina

1863-1865

Kentucky

1865

Tennessee

1865

Louisiana

1864

Texas

1863-1865

Maine

1783

Vermont

1777

Maryland

1864

Virginia

1863-1865

Massachusetts

1783

Washington, D.C.

1862

Michigan

1787

West Virgina

1863

Minnesota

1858

Western Territories 1862

Mississippi

1863-1865

Wisconson

1787

ing a disruption of economic production in these colonies, the British government simply abstained from enforcing its own abolition laws until pressure from reformers put an end to slavery. A similar situation existed in Mauritania, where slavery was prohibited by law three separate times, in 1905, 1960, and 1980, yet the government of Mauritania enacted no penalties against masters who kept slaves in violation of the emancipation law, and the government waged no campaign to inform the slaves of their freedom. As a result, journalists and investigators for the Interna-

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tional Labor Organisation found slavery still flourishing in Mauritania in the 1990’s. Even in societies that vigorously enforced their acts of abolition, legal emancipation was usually followed by a period of transition in which former slaves were held in a state resembling that of slavery. The Abolition of Slavery Act of 1833, which outlawed slavery in most colonies of the British Empire, provided that slaves would serve as apprentices to their former masters for a period of four to six years. In the American South after the Civil War, former slaves were subject for a time to black codes that greatly reduced the freedom of movement of African Americans and required them to work on the plantations of former slave masters. After the Civil Rights Act of 1866 and the Fourteenth Amendment outlawed such practices, southerners created the sharecropping and crop-lien systems, which allowed planters to control the labor of many African Americans through a form of debt bondage. Harold D. Tallant Further Reading Slavery and the Making of America (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005) by James Oliver Horton and Lois E. Horton provides a detailed examination of American slavery. The Antislavery Debate: Capitalism and Abolitionism as a Problem in Historical Interpretation (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992), edited by Thomas Bender, is a collection of essays that debate the question of whether the rise of industrial capitalism caused the emergence of the antislavery movement. David Brion Davis’s The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Revolution, 1770-1823 (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1975) is a Pulitzer Prize-winning study of the intellectual background of the rise of the antislavery movement. Davis’s Slavery and Human Progress (New York: Oxford University Press, 1984) is an excellent introduction to many of the ethical issues regarding slavery organized around a discussion of changing concepts of progress. Moses I. Finley’s Ancient Slavery and Modern Ideology (New York: Viking Press, 1980) is a study of the moral, intellectual, and social foundations of slavery by the leading expert on ancient slavery. Eric Foner’s Nothing But Free-

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dom: Emancipation and Its Legacy (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1983) is a brief but thought-provoking study of the problems associated with emancipation in several countries. Orlando Patterson’s Slavery and Social Death: A Comparative Study (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1982), the most important study of slavery in its various forms, is based on a massive survey of slave societies on all continents from the beginning of history. William D. Phillips’s Slavery from Roman Times to the Early Transatlantic Trade (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1985) is a highly readable historical survey of the transition from ancient slavery to modern slavery. See also Abolition; Abolitionist movement and women; Agriculture; Amistad slave revolt; Antislavery laws of 1777 and 1807; Baptist Church; Civil War; Clotilde capture; Confiscation Acts of 1861 and 1862; Demographic trends; Emancipation Proclamation; Free blacks; Groves v. Slaughter; National Coalition of Blacks for Reparations in America; Native Americans and African Americans; New York City slave revolt; Northwest Ordinance; Roots; Scott v. Sandford; Segregation; Slavery and families; Slavery and race relations; Slavery and women; Slavery in Massachusetts; Slavery in Virginia; Stono Rebellion; Three-fifths compromise; Underground Railroad

Slavery and families Despite immense obstacles, African American slaves forged strong family bonds and created communities that valued marriage, nurtured children, cared for the aged, and preserved commitment to nuclear family groups. Although conditions under slavery varied widely and included many humane and even loving master-slave relationships, the laws governing slavery made it impossible for slaves to enjoy secure family lives. Not only could slaveholders sell any of their slaves, regardless of family ties, but slaves could not legally marry. Moreover, any child born to a slave woman was legally a slave, even if the father was a free black or a white man. None of

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these deterrents to stable family life, however, kept slaves from valuing and trying to maintain family groups and kinship ties, and slaves were able, even in the face of immense obstacles, to shape a family-oriented culture that provided them emotional support, self-esteem, and a measure of autonomy from the white culture that controlled so much of their lives. Marriage Although slave marriage vows were not legally binding, slaves themselves—and most masters—recognized the commitments of those who claimed to be married. Most owners encouraged marriages: Marriage was regarded as the foundation of moral society; Moreover, family ties and responsibilities increased owners’ hold on their slaves, since masters could determine whether to allow relationships to continue and could dictate the conditions under which they survived. Being able to separate spouses or family members was a powerful threat that slave owners held over their workers. Some slaveholders arranged marriages, but most allowed their slaves to choose their own mates. Although most owners preferred that their slaves select spouses from their own holdings, they usually allowed marriages with slaves owned by others. Despite their positions of authority, owners probably worried about the ill effects of having workers discontented by thwarted love. Hence, the majority of slave marriages were marriages of love, not arrangement. Most slaves marked their commitment by a ceremony of some sort, ranging from elaborate weddings that imitated those of whites (and were sometimes even arranged and attended by white families) to simply moving in together. Often weddings were accompanied by the folk custom of “jumping the broomstick” to see who would have the most authority in the relationship. In wedding ceremonies, couples usually refrained from pledging to be together “till death do us part,” as there was little assurance that they would have the final say in the matter. “What God has brought together, let no man put asunder” was not a realistic pronouncement at slave weddings, since owners could legally sunder couples at any time. Instead, some slaves vowed to stay

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married “till death or distance do us part.” If slave couples were separated by the sale of one spouse, more often than not the sale was considered, realistically, tantamount to the spouse’s death. Remarriage was the norm after such breakups, and children from former unions were assimilated into the new households. Nevertheless, a majority of slave marriages lasted for many years. Most married slaves lived in single-family cabins. If husbands or wives were lucky (and, usually, light-skinned), they were perhaps assigned to work in the “big house” of the master or engage in a special craft, such as blacksmithing or carpentry. But most slaves, male and female, were field hands. Field workers usually spent from dawn to dusk, six days a week, plowing, planting, weeding, or harvesting. Some owners gave their hands Saturday afternoons off to take care of their own chores—washing clothes, hunting, making and mending clothes, making candles, repairing their cabins, or tending their own gardens. Even then, slave couples had little time to spend together. Slaves who had married “abroad”—that is, to someone not owned by the same master— might or might not have been allowed to spend weekday evenings with their spouses.

Slave family on a southern plantation. (Library of Congress)

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Children and Childhood On average, slave women had around seven children. Pregnant women were often not given adequate prenatal care. Infant mortality among African Americans was greater than among whites, probably because of the lack of care and poor diets during pregnancy and early childhood. Pregnant women were typically expected to perform their normal duties to within a month of giving birth and to be back on the job a few weeks following birth. Generally, nursing mothers could leave their work long enough to feed their infants only three or four times a day, and they were expected to wean their babies at what for the time was an early age. Slave women too elderly to do field work often tended infants and young children, while older children were frequently left unsupervised. Most slave children were allowed to have real childhoods of carefree play. They did not, however, get to spend a great deal of time with their parents, who would be away from them from dawn to dusk. Youngsters were not usually expected to work until they were eight to twelve years old, and then they were gradually assimilated into the workforce. They would, over several years, begin to be assigned duties. At first they performed light chores and spent fewer hours working than adults, but in the course of adolescence they came to take on the full workload of adults. Many children did not realize their condition of bondage until they were close to working age. Their realization sometimes came when their white playmates would go off to school without them or when the masters’ children began to assume authority over them. Parents and Parenting Slaves, like nineteenth century Americans in general, considered fathers to be the head of the household. Even though parents could be subjected to various humiliations at the hand of their owners and had to be deferential in public, African American families tried to preserve the dignity of parents, especially fathers, within the household. Since white owners provided slave families with food staples, clothing, and housing, many of the roles traditionally assigned to fathers were preempted by slave

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masters. Moreover, white masters and mistresses could discipline any slave; parents were often helpless in protecting themselves and their families from verbal and physical abuse. Some female slaves had to submit to being raped by their white masters or were even forced to live the lives of concubines. Husbands, parents, and siblings were helpless to defend their loved ones from this fate. Children were often shielded from knowledge of the worst abuses of slavery, such as rapes or whippings, but they ultimately learned of the full implications of bondage. Many slave narratives describe how youngsters were traumatized when they first witnessed a lashing or other event that made them fully cognizant of their own condition. Although slave parents tried to shield their children from the effects of slavery, they also had to teach their children survival skills. Harsh punishments were meted out to children who violated racial codes of conduct. Children had to learn early on to be deferential in the presence of whites and to submit to the authority of even young white children. They also had to learn to protect the community in the slave quarters. Discretion and not repeating conversations they heard were of great importance. Parents whose children violated survival codes of conduct usually responded with severe punishments, including slaps, shakings, and hard spankings, for children who did not learn these survival behaviors endangered themselves, their families, and communities. Despite the many ways slavery undermined traditional parental roles, African American parents remained providers for their families. There was enough food on most plantations, but it was not plentiful and lacked variety. Diets often lacked protein unless they were supplemented by game. Male slaves were sometimes allowed to supplement their families’ food allotments by hunting, fishing, and trapping. Parents of both sexes sometimes tended personal gardens. Mothers cooked, cleaned, and sewed. Although most masters provided male slaves with blankets and clothes, women were usually given cloth and expected to make their own dresses and children’s clothes. Generally, boys as well as girls wore baggy, dresslike garments until they reached the age of ten or twelve. When young boys reached this age, they were

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given their own chores to do and also graduated into wearing pants. With these changes, they came of age. Parents’ roles in family life revolved around the satisfaction of families’ daily needs. Slave narratives reveal strong bonds of love between parents and children, especially between children and mothers. Loving home lives offered slaves a psychological buffer that offset the damages of slavery and provided a sanctuary where they could be themselves away from the scrutiny of whites. Moreover, the culture that flourished in the slave quarters fostered strong family and community values and practices that differed significantly from those of white Americans. African Heritage By the mid-nineteenth century, African Americans were usually several generations removed from their African heritage, yet some Africanisms remained central to their lives. Their music retained African rhythms; their games were often adaptations of African games. Many slaves preferred folk remedies to the medicines prescribed by white practitioners. Although most slaves became Christians, their Christianity was generally of a more exuberant kind than that of whites, and it often existed side by side with beliefs in conjuring and voodoo. Moreover, the values of the slave community did not always mirror those of the white culture that shaped so much of their lives. For example, in an era when white America demanded chastity of unmarried women, African American communities often followed the practice of many African tribes, accepting as normal some premarital sexual experimentation while expecting fidelity after marriage. Marriage to blood cousins was also usually taboo in African American communities, although it was fairly common in white society. Extended kinship networks were maintained, and the elderly were valued as they had been in Africa. Attitudes and Assumptions Common assumptions about the family life of African Americans have been rooted in misperceptions that arose both during the era of slavery and in modern times. In the nineteenth century,

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841

slavery apologists and antislavery proponents alike often maintained that African Americans did not possess the same capacity for familial love as did whites, were by nature promiscuous, and were too childlike to take seriously the responsibilities of family life. These assumptions were held despite massive evidence to the contrary. Of course, such beliefs made it easier to condone slavery, especially the practice of selling individuals away from their families. Slave owners, however, often acknowledged in practice their slaves’ family feelings. As the law allowed owners to sell slaves without regard to family and kinship ties, many did so, but others took pains to keep families together—at least until economic factors outweighed their good intentions. Most owners sold slaves, even removing them from their families, if they got into serious financial trouble. In such cases, owners often arranged family breakups while parents or spouses were away to avoid emotional scenes as much as possible. Such precautions are evidence of their anticipation of heartfelt responses to their actions; records by persons who witnessed children being sold away from their parents, spouses being separated from each other, and brothers being taken away from their sisters bear testimony to the heartbreak such separations caused. In the mid-twentieth century it was commonly believed that slavery had fostered a matriarchal structure in many modern black families, with mothers providing economic stability and fathers either emasculated or absent. By the 1970’s, however, studies refuted assumptions that modern manifestations of African American family life or current dysfunctions in black families could be accounted for by slavery. Studies of the family life of slaves showed that they valued nuclear families and kinship ties. Most slave families were two-parent families, and in the years following emancipation thousands of African Americans tried desperately to reunite families forcibly separated during slavery, creating new communities with strong kinship and friendship ties that provided support networks. Such evidence suggests that the matriarchal family structures and dysfunctions found in some twentieth-century African American families have more recent origins than slavery.

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Genealogy Family trees show that slaves often used naming patterns that emphasized kinship ties, especially in the nineteenth century. In the first two centuries of slavery in America, masters commonly assigned names to slaves they purchased and to children born as their property. Slaves, however, resisted this coopting of their identity. Many had private names used only in the slave quarters, and when allowed to name their children, slaves often followed African customs, naming offspring after events or seasons. Males were commonly named after their fathers, grandfathers, or other family members but almost never after a master, although sometimes female slaves might be given the name of a particularly favored mistress. Genealogy also reveals many slave families with racially mixed lineages. Children of slave women raped by white men were usually assimilated into their mothers’ homes and raised without any acknowledgment of kinship from their white fathers. African Americans who try to trace their family roots often have a difficult time finding records before 1870, the first year the United States census named most African Americans, since slaves were listed as numbers only. Plantation records sometimes list births, deaths, and sales; letters and diaries might shed light on family histories. Nonetheless, tracing family lines during slavery is quite difficult; tracing lineages back to African origins is usually impossible. In this respect, slavery has had an ongoing effect on African Americans’ sense of family. Grace McEntee Further Reading Blassingame, John W. The Slave Community: Plantation Life in the Antebellum South. Rev. ed. New York: Oxford University Press, 1979. Classic work by the first African American to write a major study of slavery and the first to base his study mostly on accounts of former slaves. Finkelman, Paul, ed. Women and the Family in a Slave Society. New York: Garland, 1989. Essays mostly published in the 1970’s and 1980’s that cover an array of topics dealing with marriage, family, and sexuality in southern slave cultures.

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Genovese, Eugene D. Roll, Jordan, Roll: The World the Slaves Made. New York: Vintage, 1974. Seminal, thoroughly documented work covering all aspects of slave society and a classic that challenged and changed previous assumptions about slave culture. Gutman, Herbert G. The Black Family in Slavery and Freedom, 17501925. New York: Vintage Books, 1976. Landmark book written to refute Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s The Negro Family in America, which claimed that a “pathology” brought on by centuries of slavery explained “the deterioration of the Negro family” in the United States. Kolchin, Peter. American Slavery, 1619-1877. New York: Hill & Wang, 1993. Traces the evolution of slavery in America and puts it in historic context with other forms of servitude. Redford, Dorothy Spruill, with Michael D’Orso. Somerset Homecoming: Recovering a Lost Heritage. New York: Doubleday, 1988. First-person account of Redford’s success in tracing her family’s roots and what she discovered about slave families in the process. See also Slave codes; Slavery; Slavery and race relations; Slavery and the justice system; Slavery and women; Slavery in Massachusetts; Slavery in Virginia

Slavery and race relations The enslavement of people of African ancestry was closely connected to the development of both racial prejudice and racial inequality in the United States. The heritage of slavery prevented African Americans from entering into the mainstream of American life even after slavery was abolished. Debates over responsibility for slavery and the legacy of slavery have complicated relations between African Americans and whites. One of the theoretical points debated by historians is whether Europeans and Euro-Americans imposed slavery on people from Africa because they viewed Africans as inferior or whether rac-

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ism came into existence as a justification for slavery. Some historians have suggested that as Europeans expanded their control over much of the world, they came into contact with many who were unlike themselves in appearance and in culture. Ethnocentrism, the tendency to see one’s own group as the standard by which all others are to be judged, may have led Europeans to see the people of Asia and Africa as inferior to themselves. Thus, people from China, as well as people from Africa, were brought to the Americas as forced labor at various times. Historians such as George Frederickson, however, have maintained that racism was a consequence rather than a cause of slavery. From this point of view, the growth of plantation economies in North and South America encouraged the importation of slave labor because these economies required large numbers of workers. Native Americans did not make good slaves because they were in their homeland and could easily escape. Slave owners needed to justify holding other humans in bondage, according to this theory, so they argued that their slaves were childlike and needed the protection of their masters. Thus, the influential apologist for slavery Henry Hughes argued in his Treatise on Sociology (1854) that the simple slaves as well as the masters benefited from the arrangement. To some extent, the relationship between slavery and racism is similar to the ancient question of whether the chicken or the egg came first. The European enslavement of Africans was probably encouraged by feelings of European superiority. Once slavery became established, though, it was necessary to justify it, and the American descendants of Europeans could comfort themselves with claims that their slaves were inferior beings. Many of the stereotypes of African Americans developed during slavery continued to flourish well into the twentieth century. The racism of slavery outlived slavery itself; films, radio programs, and books before the Civil Rights era often portrayed black Americans as childlike, comic, servile, or dangerously unable to control themselves. The sociologist Stanford M. Lyman has observed that popular American films ranging from Birth of a Nation (1915) to Gone with the Wind (1939) drew on the racial images of slavery to portray “good” blacks as humorous, loyal,

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obedient family servants and “bad” blacks as rebellious and violent. Consequences of Master-Slave Relations Economist Raymond S. Franklin has noted that one of the debates regarding consequences of master-slave relations concerns whether slaves and their descendants were in some way damaged by being owned and controlled. A number of historians, including Kenneth Stampp, Stanley Elkins, and William Styron, have held that being slaves left psychological scars on the slaves and damaged social institutions that slaves passed on to free black Americans. Along these lines, in 1966, Daniel Patrick Moynihan published a controversial report on the black family, in which he maintained that the experience of slavery contributed to the weakness of the black family. More recently, Harvard sociologist Orlando Patterson has claimed that the slave status undermined the roles of husband and father for black men and reinforced the central role of women in families. Franklin observes that some historians and social thinkers have argued that the master-slave relationship actually strengthened many black social institutions by promoting the need to resist slavery. Historian Herbert Gutman, for example, offered evidence that slavery had actually strengthened black families. The historian Eric Foner has traced the origins of the black church, a central institution in African American history, to the religious activities of slaves who organized themselves into churches after emancipation. Geographical Consequences of Slavery Slaves were heavily concentrated in the southern part of the United States. Even after the end of slavery, African Americans continued to be a southern population. In 1860, on the eve of the Civil War, 94 percent of the people of African ancestry in the United States were concentrated in the slave-owning states of the South. This percentage did decline notably in the years following World War I, and the descendants of slaves did move to other regions over the course of the twentieth century. Nevertheless, at the end of the century, the geographical legacy of slavery was still

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African Americans Living in the Former Slave States of the South, 1860-1990 (as percentages of all African Americans) 94.2

1860 1870

92.1

1880

91.8

1890

91.0

1900

89.9

1910

89.0

1920

79.4

1930

73.6

1940

77.0 68.0

1950 60.3

1960 1970

53.0

1980

53.0

1990

52.8

0

10

20

30

60 40 50 Percentage

70

80

90

100

Source: U.S. Census of Population and Housing, 1860-1990.

evident; the 1990 U.S. census showed a majority of the American black population residing in the South. In many areas of the South, working as sharecroppers or lowpaid wage laborers during the years following slavery, African Americans continued to do much the same sort of agricultural labor that they had performed as slaves. In order to maintain white

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domination, in regions with large black populations, southern whites sought to replace slavery with segregation, which placed African Americans in a separate and disadvantaged position. This kept African Americans dependent on whites and subservient to whites in a manner that was similar in many ways to the old master-slave relationship. These patterns may have even survived the years following the Civil Rights movement. As recently as the 1990’s, sociologist Ruth Kornfield, looking at a rural community in Tennessee, found that patron-client relationships between white employers and black employees continued to mirror master-slave relationships. The continuing concentration of African Americans in the South was one of the reasons that early actions of the Civil Rights movement concentrated primarily on this region. Despite the stubborn survival of many old patterns of racial inequality in this region, numbers have given African Americans in this part of the country some measure of power. In 1993, two-thirds of the blackelected officials in the United States were from the southern states. Furthermore, the major southern cities of Atlanta, Georgia; New Orleans, Louisiana; Birmingham, Alabama; and Richmond, Virginia, all had black mayors. The Legacy of Slavery and Urbanization Although the South did not cease to be home to the largest proportion of African Americans, the group did shift from being heavily rural to being heavily urban. Over the course of the twentieth century, the agricultural jobs that black Americans continued to perform after slavery became increasingly unavailable as farms mechanized. In the years following World War II, African Americans moved to cities. They tended to settle in central urban areas because the U.S. government built housing projects reserved for the poor in these urban areas, and the heritage of slavery and of the system of segregation that had emerged from slavery left African Americans disproportionately poor. During the same years, whites were moving from cities to suburbs. Racism, an ideology with roots in America’s centuries of slavery, contributed to the unwillingness of homeowners, real estate companies, and mortgage lenders to allow African Americans to move into homes in the suburbs.

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As a result of the movement of whites to suburbs and African Americans to cities, the two groups came to live in separate places. Although schools and other public facilities ceased to be legally segregated after the 1960’s, many urban neighborhoods and schools contained virtually no whites. This not only limited contact between members of the different races, but it also separated African Americans from the jobs and opportunities that became much more abundant in the suburbs. Further, even after it became easier for middle-class African Americans to move into suburban neighborhoods, the poorest were left isolated in inner cities. Questions of Responsibility Professor and social commentator Shelby Steele has observed that the question of innocence is central to race relations in the United States. Many African Americans maintain that they are innocent victims of the aftermath of slavery. The problem of race relations, from this perspective, is one of achieving equality of condition for people who suffer disadvantages as a group through no fault of their own. White Americans also frequently put forward claims of innocence. They maintain that white people alive at the end of the twentieth century, well more than a century after the end of slavery, cannot be held responsible for the legacy of slavery. Therefore, programs such as affirmative action that aim at increasing African Americans’ share of positions in employment and education seek to benefit the descendants of slaves at the expense of whites who are innocent of responsibility for slavery. In discussing issues of historical responsibility, whites will often become defensive, and any assertions of black disadvantage will sometimes be seen by whites as moral accusations. Reparations The issue of reparations is one of the most controversial consequences of the thorny ethical issue of historical responsibility. The term “reparations” refers to compensation paid by one nation or group of people to another for damages or losses. The United States government, for example, has made some payments to

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Japanese Americans for violating their civil rights by imprisoning them during World War II. Advocates of reparation payments for African Americans, such as the scholar Manning Marable, have argued that slavery was a massive denial of civil rights to this group. These advocates point out that slave labor built up much of the nation’s wealth, allowing it to industrialize and therefore making it possible for the United States to achieve its current level of development. They point out that the descendants of slaves continue to suffer damages from slavery because African Americans have lower incomes, on average, than other Americans and tend to hold much less of the country’s wealth. Opponents of reparations maintain that while slavery is a historical source of contemporary disadvantages of African Americans, reparations would attempt to right a past injustice by penalizing present-day whites. Further, if reparations were paid to all African Americans, some rich African Americans would be receiving tax money taken from middle-class or even poor whites. Finally, opponents of reparations suggest that payments of this sort would be enormously unpopular politically and might increase racial hatred and conflict. Carl L. Bankston III Further Reading George M. Frederickson’s White Supremacy: A Comparative Study in American and South African History (New York: Oxford University Press, 1981) is a classic work on the development of racism and racial exploitation. The second chapter of Raymond S. Franklin’s Shadows of Race and Class (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1991) gives an excellent summary of major debates regarding the legacy of slavery. Ira Berlin’s Many Thousands Gone: The First Two Centuries of Slavery in North America (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press, 1998) is a comprehensive study of the history of American slavery and of how slavery shaped racial identities. Edward Ball considers the impact of slavery both on his own family of former slave owners and on the descendants of his family’s slaves in Slaves in the Family (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1998). The last work looks not only at the lingering re-

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sentment and suspicion toward local whites of the descendants of the slaves but also at the feelings of ill-defined guilt and defensiveness among the descendants of the slave owners. Clarence J. Munford gives arguments for the payment of reparations for slavery to African Americans in Race and Reparations: A Black Perspective for the Twenty-first Century (Trenton, N.J.: Africa World Press, 1996). On the other hand, Dinesh D’Souza’s highly controversial book The End of Racism: Principles for a Multiracial Society (New York: Free Press, 1995) claims that whites bear no responsibility at all for contemporary racial inequality. D’Souza also denies that the history of slavery gives African Americans any moral claims as a group. See also Abolition; Great Migration; Jim Crow laws; Moynihan Report; National Coalition of Blacks for Reparations in America; Roots; Slavery; Slavery and families; Slavery and the justice system; Slavery and women; Slavery in Massachusetts; Slavery in Virginia; Stereotypes; Stono Rebellion

Slavery and the justice system Slavery defined the legal treatment of African Americans for two and one-half centuries, and the crusade against slavery gave rise to modern concepts of citizenship and civil rights. The first African laborers in the English colonies of North America arrived in Virginia in 1619. By the 1770’s, slaves made up onefifth of the population of the English colonies. At this time, slave labor was used in every colony, including those in the North. Only in the South, however, did slavery dominate economic life. Slaves were used primarily to grow staple crops such as tobacco and rice for exportation to Europe and the Caribbean. Slavery and the Territories As Americans moved westward, the issue of whether slavery should expand into the new territories became increasingly important. Americans realized that new western states would de-

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termine the balance of political power between North and South. Congress initially divided the new territories between North and South. In the Northwest Ordinance (1787), Congress banned slavery in the lands north of the Ohio River while implicitly accepting slavery south of the Ohio. In regard to the Louisiana Purchase, the Missouri Compromise of 1820 banned slavery north of the line at 36° north latitude while allowing slavery to exist south of the line. The Missouri Compromise resolved the issue of slavery in the territories until the Mexican War of 1846-1848 added new western lands to the United States. Subsequently, four positions emerged regarding the issue. Many northerners favored the Wilmot Proviso, a proposal to ban slavery in the territories. Other Americans favored popular sovereignty, which would allow the people of the territories to decide the issue for themselves. Some Americans favored extending the Missouri Compromise line to the Pacific coast. Many southerners believed the federal government should protect slavery in the territories. In the 1850’s, the popular sovereignty approach gained ascendancy. The Compromise of 1850 applied popular sovereignty to California, New Mexico, and Utah. The Kansas-Nebraska Act (1854) repealed the old Missouri Compromise boundary and enacted popular sovereignty for the Louisiana Purchase. The Kansas-Nebraska Act created such great controversy that the existing political alignment was shattered. Opponents of the act created a new antislavery political party, the Republican Party, while supporters of the act reconstructed the Democratic Party as a proslavery party. Disagreements regarding slavery-related issues and sectional competition for political power led ultimately to the outbreak of the Civil War in 1861. During the war, northern military officials increasingly believed that freeing the South’s slaves would severely injure the Confederacy. President Abraham Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation in 1863, proclaiming that the Union army would henceforth liberate the Confederacy’s slaves. In 1865, the Thirteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution freed all remaining slaves belonging to American citizens.

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Slavery and the U.S. Constitution Slavery significantly influenced the writing of the U.S. Constitution. The Constitutional Convention of 1787 nearly broke up because of disagreements regarding sectional issues. Ultimately the sectional impasse was resolved with the Compromise of 1787. Direct taxes and representation in the House of Representatives were to be apportioned according to the three-fifths rule: All free people and three-fifths of the slaves were to be counted in determining a state’s tax burden and congressional representation. Congress could prohibit the importation of slaves into the United States after the lapse of twenty years. States were prohibited from freeing fugitive slaves, and slaveholders were given the right to cross state boundaries to recapture fugitives. Congress was prevented from taxing exports so that slavery would not be injured by excessive taxes on the products of slave labor. Finally, to ensure that the compromise would not be abrogated, the clauses regarding the international slave trade and the three-fifths rule were declared by the Constitution to be unamendable. As the Civil War approached, Americans debated the significance of these actions. What was the relationship between the U.S. Constitution and slavery? Before 1860, most Americans believed that the Constitution did not establish a federal right to own slaves. Slavery was thought to exist as a result of state laws, and the federal government was thought to have few constitutional powers regarding slavery. Northerners and southerners disagreed regarding the practical application of this idea. Southerners believed the federal government was increasingly intruding into matters related to slavery. They called for an end to federal interference with slavery. Northerners argued that the federal government had been indirectly providing protection to slavery for years. They called for the withdrawal of this protection. In the 1840’s and 1850’s, militants on both sides developed new constitutional theories regarding slavery. Some southerners claimed that there was a federal right to own slaves, established in the fugitive slave clause and the privileges and immunities clause of the U.S. Constitution. The federal government, they said, must protect the right of citizens to own slaves in the ter-

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ritories. Some southern extremists argued that the federal right to own slaves was so comprehensive that even northern states could not outlaw slavery within their own boundaries. Ironically, the branch of the abolitionist movement led by William Lloyd Garrison agreed with this argument, claiming that the Constitution protected slavery and arguing that northern states should abandon this corrupt document by withdrawing from the Union. Another branch of the abolitionist movement, led by Gerrit Smith and William Goodell, argued to the contrary that the Constitution was best read as an antislavery document. They claimed that citizenship was based on residence in the United States and that slaves therefore were citizens. The privileges and immunities clause of the Constitution, they claimed, prevented both the states and the federal government from giving unequal treatment to citizens. The due process clause of the Fifth Amendment prevented citizens from losing their liberty without due process of law. Slavery violated these principles, and judges therefore ought to declare slavery unconstitutional. While this interpretation of the Constitution seemed extreme and utopian at the time, after the Civil War, the abolitionists’ constitutional ideas were incorporated into the Fourteenth Amendment. Fugitive Slave Laws One of the most significant controversies regarding slavery involved fugitive slave laws. In 1793, Congress adopted legislation to enforce the fugitive slave clause of the U.S. Constitution. The Fugitive Slave Act of 1793 allowed slaveholders to obtain warrants from either state or federal courts for the rendition of fugitive slaves. In the 1820’s and 1830’s, several states passed personal liberty laws to prevent state officials from assisting in the recapture process. In Prigg v. Pennsylvania (1842), the U.S. Supreme Court upheld the constitutionality of personal liberty laws by ruling that the enforcement of fugitive slave laws rested entirely in the hands of the federal government. Without the assistance of state officials, slaveholders found that it was difficult to recapture their slaves. Southerners clamored for federal assistance. Congress responded by passing a new

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Fugitive Slave Act as a part of the Compromise of 1850. A new group of federal officials was created for the sole purpose of assisting slaveholders recapture slaves. State officials were forbidden to resist the rendition of fugitives. Even ordinary citizens could be compelled to serve in posses for the purpose of capturing fugitives. To prevent black people who were seized as fugitives from challenging their seizure, their legal rights, including the right of habeas corpus, were abolished. The Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 was met with strong opposition in the North. Hundreds of fugitives, and even some free blacks, migrated to Canada to avoid seizure under the new law. Many northern communities formed vigilance committees to assist fugitives, and in a few cases northern mobs tried to rescue fugitives from the hands of government officials. One rescue in 1854 led to a conflict between Wisconsin and the federal government. This case is notable because Wisconsin, a northern state, used states’ rights arguments to challenge federal authority, a ploy normally used by southerners to defend slavery. Sherman M. Booth, an abolitionist, was arrested by federal marshals for participating in the rescue of a fugitive slave. The Wisconsin State Supreme Court twice issued writs of habeas corpus to free Booth from federal imprisonment and declared the federal Fugitive Slave Act to be unconstitutional. The U.S. Supreme Court in Abelman v. Booth (1859) reasserted the primacy of federal over state law and the right of the federal government to enforce its own laws through its own courts. The Wisconsin court accepted this decision, now believing that it did not help the antislavery cause to promote the idea of states’ rights and nullification of federal law. Legal Treatment of Slaves African laborers occupied an ambiguous status in the American colonies before 1660 because English law did not recognize the status of slavery. Some Africans were held as slaves; others were held as indentured servants, persons whose term of labor expired after several years. Indentured servants enjoyed certain additional legal protections since, unlike slaves, their physical bodies were not owned by their masters. After 1660, Virginia and

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The value of slaves as laborers made execution and imprisonment uneconomic punishments for wrongdoing, thereby leaving corporal punishments—such as floggings—common. (Library of Congress)

Maryland constructed elaborate slave codes to establish the legal status of slavery. For the next two centuries, the vast majority of African Americans were slaves. In making and enforcing slave codes, Americans recognized slaves as both people and property. As property, slaves generally had few legal rights as independent beings. Slaves could not own property, enter into contracts, sue or be sued, or marry legally. Slaves had no freedom of movement. Masters could sell their slaves without restriction, and there was no legal protection for slave families against forced separation through sale. The status of slave children was inherited from their mothers, a departure from the traditional common-law doctrine that children inherited the status of their fathers. In some ways, the masters’ property rights in slaves were limited by compelling public interest. Most southern states made it difficult for masters to free their slaves on the theory that free blacks were a nuisance to society. Most southern states also tried to prevent slaves from becoming a threat to society. State laws often required slaves to carry passes when traveling away from their masters’ homes. Laws in several states prohibited slaves from living alone without the supervision of whites. In all but two states, it was illegal for anyone to teach slaves to read or write. Some states banned the use of alcohol and firearms by slaves; others outlawed trading and gambling by slaves. Although these laws were primarily a burden to the slave popula-

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tion, they also restricted the manner in which masters could manage and use their property. Southern law codes occasionally recognized slaves as people as well as property. By the mid-nineteenth century, most states provided slaves with a minimal degree of protection against physical assaults by whites, although these laws were generally poorly enforced. All states outlawed the murder and harsh treatment of slaves. Although masters were occasionally put on trial for murder of their slaves, evidence suggests that most homicidal masters either received light sentences or were not punished. Laws protecting slaves against other forms of inhumane treatment (such as excessive beatings or starvation diets) were almost never enforced. In practice, masters could beat or starve their slaves with impunity. Battery of slaves by strangers was illegal and was often punished by southern courts. Rape of slaves by whites, however, was not illegal. Masters had the full legal right to rape their own slaves, although masters could charge other whites with criminal trespass for an act of rape without the master’s permission. Under the law, black people were assumed to be slaves unless they could prove otherwise, meaning that free blacks were forced always to carry legal documents certifying their freedom. Many actions, including the use of alcohol and firearms, were illegal for slaves but not for whites. Penalties for crimes were generally more severe for slaves than for whites. For slaves, capital crimes—those for which death was the penalty—included not only murder but also manslaughter, rape, arson, insurrection, and robbery. Even attempted murders, insurrections, and rapes were subject to the death penalty. Punishments Despite the harshness of the law, actual executions of slaves were rare because even slave criminals were valuable property. State laws generally required governments to pay compensation to the masters of executed slaves. The fact that the labor of slaves was valuable meant that, in all states except Louisiana, imprisonment was rarely used as punishment for slave criminals. Instead, most penalties involved physical punishments such as whipping,

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branding, or ear-cropping, punishments which were rarely used against whites after the early nineteenth century. While southern courts did not give black and white people equal treatment, the courts made some effort to be fair to slaves, probably because of the influence of wealthy slaveholders with an economic interest in the acquittal of their property. The proportion of slaves among those people accused of crime was about equal to the proportion of slaves in the population. Slaves appear to have been convicted at nearly the same rate as whites. Southern law codes also reflected the slaveholders’ interests. Many states required that slaves have access to counsel and protected them against self-incrimination and double jeopardy. Slaves, however, could not testify in court against whites, meaning that it was nearly impossible to prosecute crimes against slaves when other slaves were the only available witnesses. Harold D. Tallant Further Reading The most readable and comprehensive survey of slavery and the law is Harold M. Hyman and William M. Wiecek’s Equal Justice Under Law: Constitutional Development, 1835-1875 (New York: Harper & Row, 1982). Alan Watson’s Slave Law in the Americas (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1989) offers a succinct comparison of the law of slavery in several Western Hemisphere societies. Mark V. Tushnet’s The American Law of Slavery, 1810-1860: Considerations of Humanity and Interest (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1981) discusses the tension within American law regarding the slaves’ dual role as both property and people. The best survey of the legal treatment of slaves is Philip J. Schwarz’s Twice Condemned: Slaves and the Criminal Laws of Virginia, 1705-1865 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1988). See also Abolition; Emancipation Proclamation; Fugitive Slave Law of 1793; Fugitive Slave Law of 1850; Kansas-Nebraska Act; Missouri Compromise; Reconstruction; Scott v. Sandford; Slave codes; Slavery and families; Slavery and race relations; Slavery in Massachusetts; Slavery in Virginia; Stono Rebellion

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Slavery and women Although black and white women frequently found themselves at odds regarding slavery, women from both races transcended prevailing stereotypes and played an important role in the demise of this “peculiar institution.” The first known African slaves to arrive in North America were brought to Jamestown, Virginia, in 1619. Initially, British colonists were reluctant to embrace slavery, choosing rather to use white indentured servants. As late as 1680, only about seven thousand black people could be found in all the colonies combined. In time, however, labor demands, as well as the profitability of tobacco and cotton, made slave labor an increasingly attractive economic investment for white landowners. Not everyone, however, was happy with slavery. By the mideighteenth century, Pennsylvania’s Quakers were denouncing slavery as immoral. By the nineteenth century, the sentiment to free the slave population was growing nationwide. The American Colonization Society was organized in 1817 with the aim of recolonizing freed slaves in Africa. Their efforts, however, were largely unsuccessful: Most freed slaves considered North America to be their home and were unwilling to go to Africa. Additionally, most masters were unwilling to free their slaves without financial compensation, and no adequate plan was ever formulated to that end. In 1831, a Virginia slave named Nat Turner led an uprising that left some sixty white people dead. Fear of massive uprisings had been prevalent (although largely unsubstantiated) since the late eighteenth century, and Turner fulfilled the worst nightmare of slaveholders. Subsequently, many white people became more determined to control the South’s slave population. To free the slaves would cost a fortune, and most white southerners feared reprisal from the black community. As a group, white women in the South were as determined as their male counterparts to keep African Americans legally subjugated. It is important to note, however, that most southerners did not own slaves. In 1860, only about 25 percent of all southerners

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owned slaves. About one-half of this group owned five or fewer slaves. These figures were partially the result of the high cost of purchasing them; in the 1850’s, field hands were usually sold for at least $1,500. Consequently, slave ownership served as both a gauge of personal wealth and as a social status symbol. The more slaves one possessed, the more wealth one commanded. Even those white southerners who did not own slaves had a vested interest in the South’s upper class. Poorer white people could always look to the slaveholding gentry for inspiration to gain more wealth. Gender and Plantation Society Throughout the early nineteenth century, American society, particularly in the South, was typically patriarchal. Most men and women lived their lives under the assumption that each gender had a distinctive “sphere.” Men assumed roles of leadership and power, while women were expected to live according to the tenets of what scholars call the Cult of True Womanhood. As such, women were to be sexually chaste and pure. They were to be religiously pious, guarding society’s morality by keeping their households in good order. Likewise, they were to be keepers of the home for their husbands. Finally, they were to be submissive to established authority structures. These expectations bore especially heavy on southern women. Contrary to prevalent mythology, southern women rarely conformed to the “southern belle” stereotype, and the plantation did not shield them from a hard life. Since plantations emphasized large-scale agriculture, plantation women usually suffered from social and cultural isolation. In order to compensate for their loneliness, some wealthy women hosted extravagant social functions for which guests sometimes stayed for days. Despite their loneliness, however, plantation wives did not seek friendship from their female slaves. In addition to rural isolation, southern women also had specific jobs to perform. Plantation wives usually supervised the slaves who worked in “the great house.” Moreover, the nature of plantation agriculture demanded frequent business trips, and, in their husbands’ absence, plantation wives were responsible for

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maintaining the entire plantation, including supervising field labor and managing the financial ledgers. Middle-class and lower-class southern white women left few detailed accounts of their lives. Nevertheless, several things are clear. Most poor white women lived a much harder life than their plantation sisters. In addition to their family duties, such as cooking, cleaning, making clothes, and rearing children, most women worked in the fields with their husbands whenever possible. These women tended to be fiercely independent and generally refused to do certain menial tasks they deemed “servant work.” Life for slave women in the antebellum South was substantially different from life for white women. In slavery’s earliest phases, black men outnumbered black women by an overwhelming margin. Sex ratios stabilized over time, however, and black women were expected to labor in the fields side by side with black men. Those who did not perform fieldwork had other chores. For example, if they were too old to perform manual labor or were specifically chosen for the task, some women supervised the young children of other slaves. In some cases, they might even watch their masters’ children. Thus, unlike white women, many slave mothers were frequently denied the opportunity to rear their own children. Still others worked in the plantation home as a house servant. Such opportunities were a mixed blessing. On one hand, house servants had a higher status on the plantation than field hands. Some house servants, especially on large plantations, considered themselves to have a higher social status than poor white people. On the other hand, they generally labored under closer supervision than the other slaves, and the slightest offense could invite harsh discipline. Most masters realized that they had an interest in promoting slave marriages, believing that married slaves were less likely to run away. The masters also valued female slaves for their ability to bear children. Slave children were likewise valuable both as part of the plantation’s labor force and as a measure of control over their parents. Among slaves, it was understood that those who seemed loyal and docile were less likely to be sold, and few slaves would cause dissention on the plantation if they thought their children would be punished as a result of their actions.

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Family life also added a measure of stability to the slave quarters, from the slaves’ perspective. However bad plantation conditions might be, family members could always look to one another for solace. The family was one of the few places where slaves were free to be themselves, and mothers and fathers taught their children how to survive the rigors of plantation life. Unfortunately, slave marriages had no official legal standing in white courts. Even so, both men and women sought companionship. Sometimes, men tried to marry women from neighboring plantations to avoid seeing their wives and children mistreated. The masters had the final say in such matters, however, and they generally encouraged male slaves to marry on the plantation; otherwise, determining who owned the resulting children might be problematic. Yet, it does appear that a female slave had some role in choosing who would become her husband. Despite the benefits that marriage and family life afforded, slaves lived in constant fear. Women lived in a special kind of fear that is difficult to describe. In addition to the fear of seeing their husbands and children sold, female slaves had no protection from their masters’ unwanted sexual advances. White men sometimes fathered children by their female slaves, thus creating tension between black and white women. As Mary Boykin Chesnut, a plantation mistress in South Carolina, wryly observed, “Any lady is ready to tell you who is the father of all the mulatto children in everybody’s household but her own.” Women and Abolition As slavery became more ensconced in the social and economic fabric of early nineteenth century America, critics, many of whom were women, began calling for its demise. Among white women, Angelina and Sarah Grimké were particularly outspoken critics of “the peculiar institution.” Reared in a slaveholding household in Charleston, South Carolina, the Grimké sisters came to abhor slavery in their early adulthood because of their belief that slavery was in moral opposition to God’s purposes. Angelina published two forceful indictments against slavery entitled An Appeal to the Christian Women of the South (1836) and An

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Women were among the best-known leaders of the abolitionist movement. This fanciful painting depicts President Abraham Lincoln, the “Great Emancipator,” meeting with Sojourner Truth, a tireless opponent of slavery. (Library of Congress)

Appeal to the Women of the Nominally Free States (1837). Both sisters earned a reputation for their public lectures against slavery. In addition to lecturing, some female abolitionists committed their sentiments to verse. Julia Ward Howe was an American poet who coedited Commonwealth, an abolitionist newspaper in Boston, with her husband, Samuel Gridley Howe. In 1861, she visited military camps near Washington, D.C., and received the inspiration for her most famous work, “The Battle Hymn of the Republic.” It was an instant success, and Union forces soon whistled and sang the tune as they marched into battle. This song so pointedly expressed the abolitionists’ righteous indignation against slavery that it was widely published in church hymnals. Among the white women who championed abolition, however, Harriet Beecher Stowe is without peer. Her novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852) has been hailed by some as the most influential fictional work in American literary history. Stowe depicted slavery, at its worst, as a monstrous institution that would victimize even the best, most loyal slaves such as Uncle Tom by allowing them to fall into the clutches of sadistic ogres such as Simon Legree. She infuriated many southerners by implying that their form of Christianity had sinned in failing to respond to slavery’s

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cruelty. Stowe also struck a chord with many northerners who had never considered the many negative aspects of slavery. White women were not alone in the campaign against slavery. Several black women gained notoriety as abolitionists, particularly Harriet Tubman and Sojourner Truth. Tubman became famous as a “conductor” in the Underground Railroad, a system of individuals who helped fugitive slaves flee the South prior to the Civil War. Tubman herself had escaped from slavery in 1849, and she returned to the South nineteen times to help an estimated three hundred slaves, including her parents, secure safe passage to the North. Likewise, Sojourner Truth became a popular antislavery lecturer in the North. Born in Hurley, New York, in 1797 as Isabella Baumtree, she ran away from her master when he refused to acknowledge New York’s emancipation law of 1827. In 1843, after a series of visions, she adopted the name “Sojourner Truth” because she believed that it reflected her divine mission. Truth believed that God had ordained her to speak out against slavery. While she may not have convinced every person in her audiences of slavery’s evils, few could listen to her and not be impressed by her resonant voice and oratorical skills. Legacy of the Abolitionist Movement Assessing the antislavery movement can be difficult, partly because many reform efforts had overlapping objectives. Such is the case with women and abolition. Many women who favored abolition also favored equal rights for women, creating one reform movement within another. These white women tended to see the plight of black slave women in the light of their own social and political powerlessness. Consequently, they sincerely wanted to see slavery abolished, but they also wanted to better their own state. Some male critics, notably William Lloyd Garrison, editor of the abolitionist newspaper The Liberator, agreed that women should have full social and political equality with men. Garrison also called for the immediate freedom of all slaves without compensation to their masters, as well as full social and political equality for freed African Americans. Many people saw Garrison

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as a radical, but it was his attitude toward women’s rights that separated him from some of his earliest backers, particularly Arthur and Lewis Tappan. Equality for women was an issue that some abolitionists refused to address. Ironically, as women called for equality and slave liberation, they may have been stifled most by a feminine influence. Abolitionists constituted a minority in nineteenth century America, and most women tended to stay within their own sphere. Catharine Beecher was perhaps the most outspoken proponent of distinct spheres for men and women. As she saw it, women had considerable power to shape society’s morality by shaping the home. Many women chose to remain keepers of their homes rather than to fight for either abolition or women’s rights. By the end of the nineteenth century, the idea of dual spheres had assumed a new cast. Many women demanded the right to vote precisely because society needed their perceived moral influence. The experience and organizational skills learned by an earlier generation of female abolitionists, both black and white, was without doubt extremely useful to subsequent reformers. Keith Harper Further Reading Abzug, Robert H. Cosmos Crumbling: American Reform and the Religious Imagination. New York: Oxford University Press, 1994. Abzug argues that reformers, particularly abolitionists, were motivated by religious conviction. Clinton, Catherine. The Plantation Mistress: Woman’s World in the Old South. New York: Pantheon Books, 1982. This work focuses on plantation women. Excellent statistical data can be found in an appendix. Fox-Genovese, Elizabeth. Within the Plantation Household: Black and White Women of the Old South. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1988. Perhaps the most comprehensive treatment of the interconnectedness between black and white women in the antebellum South. Friedman, Jean E. The Enclosed Garden: Women and Community in the Evangelical South, 1830-1900. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1985. This multidisciplinary study ar-

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gues that community, not gender, shaped the sociocultural roles of both black and white women in the South. Genovese, Eugene D. Roll, Jordan, Roll: The World the Slaves Made. New York: Pantheon Books, 1974. A classic Marxist study of slavery. This work explores the extent of self-determination by African Americans while they were in bondage. Horton, James Oliver, and Lois E. Horton. Slavery and the Making of America. New York: Oxford University Press, 2005. Scott, Anne Firor. The Southern Lady: From Pedestal to Politics, 18301930. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1970. Scott’s classic work demythologizes white Southern women. Smith, Theophus H. Conjuring Culture: Biblical Formations of Black America. New York: Oxford University Press, 1994. The author explores the formation of a distinct, African American “conjure culture,” with close attention to the particular role that women played in its creation. Walters, Ronald G. American Reformers, 1815-1860. New York: Hill and Wang, 1978. The author explores reform as an adjustment or accommodation to nineteenth century social, economic, and political forces. White, Deborah G. Ar’n’t I a Woman? Female Slaves in the Plantation South. New York: W. W. Norton, 1987. White’s work is one of the most thorough treatments of female slaves. See also Abolitionist movement and women; Slave codes; Slavery; Slavery and families; Slavery and race relations; Slavery in Massachusetts; Slavery in Virginia

Slavery in Massachusetts Legal recognition of slavery in Massachusetts Bay Colony made it an institution in Great Britain’s North American colonies and helped to ensure its survival. From its outset, the Massachusetts Bay Colony endorsed the idea of unfree labor. One hundred and eighty indentured servants arrived with the original colonists. Subsequent food shortages led

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to the surviving servants’ being set free in 1630. Unfree labor, however, continued on a private basis, and some white criminals were made slaves to court-appointed masters. Captives from the Pequot War of 1636-1637 were given over into slavery. Some of these captives were subsequently transported to a Puritan enclave off the coast of Nicaragua, and black slaves were introduced from there to the Massachusetts colony. The colony, however, remained without a formal endorsement of slavery until the promulgation of the Body of Liberties in 1641. Codifying Slave Laws The Body of Liberties was controversial in many respects. It evolved out of the gradually weakening authority of Governor John Winthrop and his first Board of Assistants, and the emergence of the General Court as a representative body of freemen. The document was crafted and adopted by Elizabethan men who had grown up in the age of Shakespeare and the King James Bible. They were not democrats, but they had a strong sense of destiny and a healthy fear of absolute authority. In a larger sense, the document came to reflect the classic and ancient struggle between church and state. In 1635, the General Court had appointed a committee to draw up a body of laws for the rights and duties of the colonists. This committee stalled over the church-state conflict, and another committee was impaneled in 1636. John Cotton sat on this committee. Cotton was a devout churchman who saw a government based on the theocracy of Israel and drafted a document that derived much of its authority from scripture. Cotton did, however, believe in limitations on authority. He also resisted adopting biblical statutes wholesale. Winthrop, who was lukewarm to the entire idea, called Cotton’s Code, “Moses his Judicialls.” Cotton’s counterpart in drawing up the code was Nathaniel Ward. Ward was a Puritan with a sense of humor and a literary bent. He later penned a humorous pamphlet of observations entitled The Simple Cobler of Aggawam. Like most Puritans, he was a friend to strict discipline, but he also was a foe to arbitrary authority. He could agree with Winthrop and Cotton that all law was the law of God, but with a view toward local conditions and

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universal morality. He insisted that the code be based on English common law rather than on the Bible. He became the chief architect and intellectual godfather of the “Massachusetts Magna Charta,” the Body of Liberties. His contribution would be a government of laws and not men. The Pequot War slowed deliberations, but by 1638, the committee had a fresh start and by 1639 had ordered a document that combined Cotton’s and Ward’s work. The final document, which owed more to Ward than to Cotton, was adopted in November, 1641. In many ways, the Body of Liberties was an enlightened document and certainly remarkable by seventeenth century standards. A compilation of one hundred laws, the Body of Liberties, while not democratic, allowed for wide judicial discretion and for each case to be judged on its merits. It also effectively barred the legal profession from defending anyone for pay, and it protected married women from assault. It also addressed the liberties of servants in humanitarian terms for those times. The number of lashes given to servants was limited to forty, and the capital laws were more lenient than those of England. The distinguished historian Samuel Eliot Morison wrote that the Body of Liberties was “an enlightened body of laws and of principles that would have done credit to any commonwealth in the 17th century. . . .” The one problem, however, was slavery. This bold document addressed the slavery issue thus: There shall never be any bond slaverie, villainage or captivitie amongst us unles it be lawfull captive, taken in just warres, and such strangers as willingly selle themselves or are sold to us. And these shall have all the liberties and Christian usages which the law of God established in Israell concerning such persons doeth morally require. This exempts none from servitude who shall be judged thereto by authoritie.

Although not a ringing endorsement of slavery, the Body of Liberties nevertheless admits of it. Thus it opened the way for the official sanction of slavery. Later and stricter codes would formalize the institution in New England on a colony-by-colony basis. The reasoning was a business decision. An early realization that the price of slaves was greater than their worth as laborers led

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the Yankee businessmen to market some of their slave cargoes to the plantation colonies. In the triangular trade of West Africa, the West Indies, and North America, the vast majority of slaves taken by New England traders ended up in the West Indies. Shrewd New England traders shipped rum, fish, and dairy products out; they imported slaves, molasses, and sugar. Those few slaves who were not dropped off in the West Indies or on southern plantations were taxed rather heavily. In 1705, Massachusetts imposed a duty of four pounds sterling per slave imported into the colony. Decline of Slavery By 1680, Governor Simon Bradstreet estimated the number of “blacks or slaves” in the Massachusetts colony at one hundred to two hundred. Some special laws were passed restricting the movement of African Americans in white society, but the Puritans encouraged Christian conversion and honored black marriages. Slavery was mild compared to the southern kind. Slaves needed to read and write to do their jobs. Although there were occasional isolated rebellions, the slaves benefited from the New England love for learning and the strong Puritan emphasis on marriage and family. Slavery gradually faded away in Massachusetts, perhaps because of its vague legal status. In the aftermath of the American Revolution, a national clamor for a Bill of Rights led individual colonies to adopt their own. While none expressly forbade slavery, the institution seemed at odds with the rhetoric. By 1776, the white population of Massachusetts was 343,845 and the black population was 5,249. The census of 1790 showed Massachusetts as the only state in which no slaves were listed. As John Winthrop stated, “wee shall be as a Citty upon a Hill, the Eies of all people are uppon us; soe that if wee shall deale falsely with our god in this worke wee have undertaken and soe cause him to withdrawe his present help from us, wee shall be made a story and a by-word through the world. . . .” Despite the legalization of slavery in the Body of Liberties, slavery was never popular in Massachusetts except as incidental to trade—and the slave trade was an accepted practice by seventeenth century Eu-

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ropean standards. The Puritans themselves were products of a rigorous, harsh, isolated experience. They were humanists and intellectuals with contradictions. They prized sincerity and truthfulness, yet practiced repression and inhibition to steel themselves against life’s ills. They had a strong element of individualism in their creed, believing that each person must face his maker alone. Puritan humanism thus never squared with the institution of slavery. Brian G. Tobin Further Reading Franklin, John Hope. From Slavery to Freedom: A History of Negro Americans. 3d ed. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1967. Classic text on the evolution of American slavery contains a chapter on “Puritan Masters.” Miller, Perry, ed. The American Puritans: Their Prose and Poetry. New York: Columbia University Press, 1982. Includes selected writings from John Cotton, Nathaniel Ward, and John Winthrop. ____________. Errand into the Wilderness. Cambridge, Mass.: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1984. A timeless source that delves into the theological underpinnings of Puritanism. Morgan, Edmund S. The Puritan Dilemma: The Story of John Winthrop. Edited by Oscar Handlin. Boston: Little, Brown, 1958. A simplified view of Puritan politics, with Massachusetts Bay’s first governor as the focal point. Morison, Samuel Eliot. Builders of the Bay Colony. Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1981. Contains individual chapters on the Elizabethan architects of Massachusetts, including John Cotton, Nathaniel Ward, and John Winthrop. Phillips, Ulrich B. American Negro Slavery. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1966. Rich in original source material about the development of slavery. See also Slave codes; Slavery; Slavery and families; Slavery and race relations; Slavery and the justice system; Slavery and women; Slavery in Virginia

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Slavery in Virginia As one of the first North American colonies to institutionalize slavery and as one of the largest and most influential colonies, Virginia established a model for slavery in the South. In March, 1661, the Virginia General Assembly declared that “all children borne in this country shalbe held bond or free only according to the condition of the mother.” Enacted to alleviate confusion about the status of children with English fathers and African mothers, this law was the first in a series of laws recognizing perpetual slavery in Virginia and equating “freedom” with “white” and “enslaved” with “black.” This law is especially indicative of the hardening of race relations in mid-seventeenth century Virginia society, as status in the patriarchal society of England traditionally was inherited from the father. By reversing this legal concept, perpetuation of enslavement for African Americans was ensured for their children, whether of black or white ancestry. Defining Who Were “Slaves” Despite the extent to which the 1661 law narrowed the options for defining Africans’ status, this act did not in itself establish slavery. Africans had two available windows through which they could obtain freedom—conversion to Christianity and manumission (formal emancipation). In 1655, mulatto Elizabeth Key brought a successful suit for her freedom, using as her main argument the fact that she had been baptized. In 1667, a slave named Fernando contended that he ought to be freed because he was a Christian and had lived in England for several years. Not only did the court deny Fernando’s appeal, but also that same year the General Assembly took another step toward more clearly defining blacks’ status, by declaring “that the conferring of baptisme doth not alter the condition of the person as to his bondage or freedome.” Planters felt that if baptism led to freedom, they would be without any assurance that they could retain their slave property. The 1667 law thereby built on the earlier one to define who would be a slave, and was clarified in 1670 and again in

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1682, when the Assembly declared that any non-Christian who was brought into the colony, either by land or by sea, would be a slave for life, even if he or she later converted. In 1691, colonial leaders provided a negative incentive to masters wishing to free their slaves by declaring that anyone who set free any “negro or mulatto” would be required to pay the costs of transporting the freedmen out of the colony within six months. Although manumissions still occurred and some free blacks managed to remain in the colony, the primary status for African Americans in Virginia was that of chattel. Virginia’s Slave Codes Although who was to be a slave in Virginia had now been defined, it had yet to be determined precisely what being a slave meant on a daily basis for Africans and their descendants. Be-

Contemporary illustration of a slave rebellion in colonial Virginia. (Library of Congress)

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tween 1661 and 1705, nearly twenty separate laws were passed limiting, defining, and prescribing the rights, status, and treatment of African Americans. In general, these laws were designed to protect planters’ slave property and to protect the order and stability of white society from an “alien and savage race.” The greater the proportion of black slaves in the overall Virginia population, the more restrictive and oppressive the laws became. Whereas Africans were only 2 percent of the total population of Virginia in 1648, they were 15 percent in 1708. In certain coastal counties, such as York, the demographic picture was even more threatening. In 1663, African Americans already made up 14 percent of the total county population; by 1701, they counted for 31 percent of the county’s inhabitants. In large part, the slave codes were motivated by the growth of the black population and whites’ fears of slave uprisings. The piecemeal establishment of slavery in these separate laws culminated in 1705 in a comprehensive slave code in Virginia. This code reenacted and strengthened a number of earlier slave laws, added further restrictions and harsher punishments, and permanently drew the color line that placed African Americans at the bottom of Virginia society. Whites were prohibited from trading with, having sexual relations with, and marrying blacks. African Americans were forbidden to own Christian servants “except of their own complexion,” leave their home plantation without a pass, own a gun or other weapon, or resist whites in any way. In this society in which private property was a basic legal tenet, a slave’s property was not protected: “be it enacted . . . that all horses, cattle or hoggs marked of any negro . . . shall be forfeited to the use of the poore of the parish . . . seizable by the church warden thereof.” Neither was slave life or limb protected by the codes. It was legal both to kill a slave accidentally while correcting him or her, and to dismember a slave guilty of running away as a means of dissuading other slaves from trying to escape. Slaves were not allowed to assemble for prayer, for entertainment, or to bury their dead. They could not testify against white people in court and were not given the right of trial by jury. The only protection mandated in the slave code was that masters

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must provide adequate food, clothing, and shelter for their slaves, and that they “not give immoderate correction.” Enforcement of the Codes Many of these enactments lacked any means of enforcement, including the sole protection, and remained as almost dead letters in the statutes. Many of the harsher penalties for slave crimes, for example, the death penalty and maiming, were not carried out nearly as frequently as the laws suggest, because doing so would harm or destroy the master’s property. Laws prohibiting slaves from trading or hiring themselves out were disregarded almost routinely. The disadvantage for slaves of this lack of enforcement was that laws prohibiting cruel treatment or defining acceptable levels of correction often were ignored as well. Where abuse was noticeably blatant, action against white offenders was taken only reluctantly, and punishments were insignificant and rare. Generally, laws in the economic and political interest of the white planter elite were enforced and respected; laws that restrained planters’ pursuits were not. To a large extent, these laws grew out of the early- to midseventeenth century laws regulating indentured servitude. Servants also were prohibited from having sexual relations with or marrying their masters; indentured women who became pregnant through such liaisons were fined, made to serve extra time, and had their children bound out to labor. Like slaves, servants were punished for attempting to run away or for resisting their masters. Servants also were treated harshly and exploited by ruthless masters eager to get every penny’s worth of effort from their laborers. Unlike African slaves, white indentured servants had legal rights and were protected by the laws and courts of the colony. Furthermore, white servants ultimately served out their time, became freemen and full citizens, acquired land and servants of their own, and became respected members of the community, regardless of their earlier status. Indentured servants had rights and opportunities, but African and African American slaves, by the turn of the eighteenth century, virtually had neither. Laura A. Croghan

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Further Reading Boskin, Joseph. Into Slavery: Racial Decisions in the Virginia Colony. Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott, 1976. Provides a brief account of the evolution of perpetual slavery and a representative selection of relevant primary documents. Good bibliographical essays. Catterall, Helen T., ed. Judicial Cases Concerning American Slavery and the Negro. 5 vols. New York: Octagon Books, 1968. Comprehensive examination of court records related to American slavery and the experiences of African Americans in slavery. Abstracts, index. Hahn, Steven. A Nation Under Our Feet: Black Political Struggles in the Rural South, from Slavery to the Great Migration. Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2003. An examination of African American political traditions dating back to the era of slavery. Hening, William Waller, ed. Statutes at Large: A Collection of All the Laws of Virginia. 13 vols. New York: R & G & W Bartow, 1823. Reprint. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1969. Chronological listing of all the laws of the Virginia colony, with index. Higginbotham, A. Leon, Jr. In the Matter of Color: Race and the American Legal Process, the Colonial Period. New York: Oxford University Press, 1978. Recounts the events culminating in the legal recognition of slavery in all the British mainland colonies. Jordan, Winthrop D. White over Black: American Attitudes Toward the Negro, 1550-1812. New York: W. W. Norton, 1968. Examines the attitudes of British colonists toward Africans, especially concerning their religions and color. Characterizes the establishment of slavery as an “unthinking decision.” Schwartz, Philip J. Twice Condemned: Slaves and the Criminal Laws of Virginia, 1705-1865. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1988. Uses criminal trial records to examine slave resistance and whites’ efforts to control threatening slave behavior. Interprets the seventeenth century as a time of adjustment or negotiation. Shaw, Robert B. A Legal History of Slavery in the United States. Potsdam, N.Y.: Northern Press, 1991. Illustrates the history of

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slavery in terms of its legislative and judicial background, from settlement through emancipation. Early chapters discuss the evolution of early slave codes. See also Abolition; Abolitionist movement and women; Slave codes; Slavery; Slavery and families; Slavery and race relations; Slavery and the justice system; Slavery and women; Slavery in Massachusetts; Stono Rebellion

Smith v. Allwright The Case: U.S. Supreme Court ruling on white primaries Date: April 3, 1944 The Supreme Court held that excluding African Americans from primaries was an unconstitutional violation of the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments. In 1923, the Texas legislature sought to disfranchise African American voters in the state by passing a resolution that “in no event shall a Negro be eligible to participate in a Democratic primary. . . .” Since the 1890’s, in Texas as in all other southern states, nomination in the Democratic primary was tantamount to election; therefore, while African Americans would be permitted to vote in the general election, they would have no meaningful role in the political process. Almost immediately after the Texas legislature barred African Americans from participating in the Democratic primary, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) secured a plaintiff, Dr. L. A. Nixon, to test the constitutionality of the legislative act. In Nixon v. Herndon (1927), the U.S. Supreme Court, in an opinion written by Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., held that the Texas statute violated the equal protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution by discriminating against African Americans on the basis of race. He also ruled, however, that it was unnecessary to strike down the white primary as a denial of suffrage “on account of race [or] color” repugnant to the Fifteenth Amendment.

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Texas Legislature The Texas legislature reacted defiantly to the Supreme Court decision. On June 7, 1927, the legislature passed a new resolution granting to the state executive committees of every political party the authority to establish the qualifications of their members and to determine who was qualified to vote or otherwise participate in the party. In turn, the Democratic Party State Executive Committee limited participation in its primary to white voters in Texas. Once again Nixon filed suit, this time against James Condon, the election officer who refused to give him a ballot in the 1928 Democratic primary. In Nixon v. Condon (1932), the Supreme Court struck down this new Texas statute as a violation of the equal protection clause. The vote was five to four. The Democratic Party State Executive Committee immediately rescinded its resolution prohibiting African Americans from voting in its primary, but the state party convention voted to limit participation in its deliberations to whites, and Nixon and the NAACP, after two Supreme Court cases and an expenditure of six thousand dollars, were once more back at the beginning. In July, 1934, Richard Randolph Grovey in Houston, Texas, was refused a ballot to vote in the Democratic primary. On April 1, 1935, in Grovey v. Townsend, Justice Owen J. Roberts ruled that the Democratic Party was a private organization, and that its primary, although held under state law, was a party matter paid for by the Democrats. Since Roberts could find no state action in the process by which Democrats nominated their candidates, there was, he said, no violation of the Fourteenth Amendment. There the matter rested. The primary was held not to be part of the general election, so there was presumably no relationship to the Fifteenth Amendment’s protection of suffrage. Because the Democratic Party was a private organization, it was free to establish membership qualifications, and there was not sufficient state involvement to invoke the guarantees of the Fourteenth Amendment. A Supreme Court Reversal It seemed there was no way to contest the validity of the Texas white primary. In 1941, however, in United States v. Classic, a case

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that ostensibly had nothing to do with African Americans or the white primary, the Supreme Court held for the first time that the right to vote was protected in a primary as well as in the general election, “where the state law has made the primary an integral part of the process of choice or where in fact the primary effectively controls the choice.” United States v. Classic dealt with a Louisiana primary in which there had been fraudulent returns, but otherwise there was no way to distinguish the Texas primary from the one held in the neighboring southern state. In Texas, as in Louisiana, in 1941 as in 1923, Democratic Party nomination in its primary was a virtual guarantee of election, and the general election was a mere formality. The NAACP was back in action. Lonnie Smith, a Houston dentist and NAACP member, sued a Texas election official for five thousand dollars for refusing to give him a ballot to vote in the 1940 Democratic congressional primaries. The NAACP’s legal counsel, Thurgood Marshall, and William Hastie, dean of the Howard Law School, brought Smith v. Allwright to the U.S. Supreme Court. In April, 1944, mindful of southern sensibilities but intent upon overruling the nine-year-old precedent in Grovey, the Court chose Stanley Reed, a Democrat from Kentucky, to write its opinion. Justice Reed’s opinion made it clear that the Court, except for Justice Roberts (the author of the Grovey decision), had concluded that the primary was an integral part of a general election, particularly in the southern states. The Classic decision, wrote Justice Reed, raised the issue of whether excluding African Americans from participation in the Democratic Party primary in Texas violated the Fifteenth Amendment. The answer was in the affirmative, and Grovey v. Townsend was expressly overruled. “If the state,” Reed said, “requires a certain election procedure, prescribing a general election ballot made up of party nominees so chosen, and limits the choice of the electorate in general elections for state officers . . . to those whose names appear on such a ballot, it endorses, adopts, and enforces the discrimination against Negroes practiced by a party entrusted by Texas law with the determination of the qualifications of participants in the primary. This is state action within the meaning of the Fifteenth Amendment.”

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The long litigative battle against the Texas white primary seemed to be over—but it was not. In Fort Bend County, Texas, the Jaybird Democratic Party, organized after the Civil War, held primaries closed to African American voters; its candidates consistently won county offices. In spite of Smith v. Allwright, the Jaybirds refused to open their primary to African Americans, arguing that they did not operate under state law or use state officers or funds. Nevertheless, in Terry v. Adams (1953), the Supreme Court held that the Jaybird primary violated the Fifteenth Amendment, because it controlled the electoral process in Fort Bend County. Aftermath It took twenty-one years for the U.S. Supreme Court to rule that the Texas white primary violated the right to vote guaranteed by the Fifteenth Amendment. It would take another twentyone years before the Voting Rights Act of 1965 finally secured the ballot for African Americans in the South. In the interim, the fall of the white primary had the practical effect of increasing African American registrants in the southern states from approximately 250,000 in 1940 to 775,000 seven years later. African Americans were still intimidated and defrauded of their suffrage rights, but Smith v. Allwright was an important landmark on the road to uninhibited enfranchisement. It also was a symbol that the Supreme Court would examine the reality behind the subterfuge and act to protect African Americans in the enjoyment of their civil rights. David L. Sterling Further Reading Fassett, John D. New Deal Justice: The Life of Stanley Reed of Kentucky. New York: Vantage Press, 1994. A biography of the conservative Democratic justice who wrote the majority opinion in Smith v. Allwright. Hine, Darlene Clark. Black Victory: The Rise and Fall of the White Primary in Texas. Millwood, N.Y.: KTO Press, 1979. An examination of the background of the white primary and the struggle to bring about its demise.

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Kluger, Richard. Simple Justice: The History of “Brown v. Board of Education” and Black America’s Struggle for Equality. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1976. An eminently readable analysis of another landmark Supreme Court case in African American history. Lawson, Steven F. Black Ballots: Voting Rights in the South, 19441969. New York: Columbia University Press, 1976. Traces the development of African American enfranchisement from Smith v. Allwright to the Voting Rights Act of 1965 and its aftermath. Includes a chapter on the white primary. Powledge, Fred. Free at Last: The Civil Rights Movement and the People Who Made It. Boston: Little, Brown, 1991. A popular account of the struggle for equality during the 1960’s, with numerous human interest stories. See also Civil Rights Act of 1960; Disfranchisement laws in Mississippi; Fifteenth Amendment; Fourteenth Amendment; Gerrymandering; Grovey v. Townsend; Newberry v. United States; Nixon v. Condon; Nixon v. Herndon; United States v. Classic; Voting Rights Act of 1965; White primaries

Southern Christian Leadership Conference Identification: Civil rights organization Date: Founded in 1957 Place: Atlanta, Georgia; New Orleans, Louisiana; and Montgomery, Alabama The formation of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) in 1957 was the first Southwide grassroots movement dedicated to racial desegregation in the United States. When the Southern Christian Leadership Conference was formed in 1957, black Americans faced many obstacles to economic and political equality despite decades of piecemeal reforms. The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), the National Urban League, the Congress of

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Racial Equality (CORE), and other advocacy organizations had achieved significant gains, but black Americans in many parts of the country were prohibited from voting and blocked by lack of education and segregationist barriers from advancing economically and socially. Particularly in the southern states, black Americans faced formidable barriers that had stood firmly and even intensified in spite of significant legal victories against segregation in interstate transportation and education. The major advocacy organizations began and operated chiefly in the North and had comparatively little impact on black southerners, who lived in perennial poverty and social ostracism. The SCLC and the Civil Rights Movement The SCLC was the first large regional civil rights organization. Its distinctive role as the political arm of many black churches gave it the ability to lead direct action campaigns with the kind of massive grassroots support that had eluded the NAACP and other older advocacy organizations. Under the leadership of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., from 1957 to 1968, the SCLC worked with other organizations in many desegregation campaigns. Its nonviolent direct action efforts were on a scale unparalleled in previous campaigns.

Martin Luther King, Jr., was the embodiment of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference through its early years. (National Archives)

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By 1957, numerous local desegregation campaigns had been launched without the benefit of a connecting framework. “Movement centers,” as Aldon D. Morris called them, included Tallahassee, Mobile, Nashville, Birmingham, Baton Rouge, and several other cities where local leaders applied interorganizational cooperation to effect changes, usually desegregation of public transit systems. What they lacked was an organizational framework to link their efforts with those in other cities and thus achieve a broader impact on behalf of integration and racial equality. Several black leaders, notably the Reverend T. J. Jemison of Baton Rouge, the Reverend Charles Kenzie Steele of Tallahassee, and the Reverend Fred Shuttlesworth of Birmingham, expressed the need for such a larger connecting framework, especially after the important bus boycott in Montgomery, Alabama, during 1955 and 1956. The 381-day Montgomery boycott, triggered by the bold defiance of segregated seating by a black seamstress, Rosa Parks, was the catalyst in bringing these various reform centers together. The “Montgomery way,” as many termed it, had demonstrated the effectiveness of mass direct action without violence. Furthermore, it underscored the value of pooling ideas and resources to challenge laws and traditions that supported segregated public facilities such as restaurants, movie theaters, and hotels. Transportation was a particularly significant area needing attention, because many African Americans depended upon public transit to get to their jobs. Expanding the Struggle Several informal groups began in late 1956 to plan a broad organization for enlarging the civil rights struggle. One of these groups included Ella Jo Baker, a perennial supporter of direct action reform, white attorney Stanley David Levison, and civil rights advocate Bayard Rustin. In New York, they formed a small group known as “In Friendship” and began to contact civil rights leaders across the South. Meanwhile, Martin Luther King, Jr., and the Reverend Ralph David Abernathy, along with others such as Joseph E. Lowery, Steele, and Jemison, met periodically in Montgomery to brainstorm on a possible southern direct action organization.

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It would be a mistake to attribute this interest entirely to the Montgomery campaign or to contextual factors such as urbanization and its related tensions. The historical setting of the origins of the SCLC included these things as well as the impact of the Brown v. Board of Education case of May, 1954, that declared unconstitutional “separate but equal” schools, based on the 1896 Plessy v. Ferguson decision. The Brown case was a particularly encouraging factor because it showed that the Supreme Court could be a valuable ally of black reform leaders. In early 1956, Rustin suggested to King in Montgomery the concept of a broad organization to link the various reform centers. By the end of the year, the discussions had advanced sufficiently to attempt an organization meeting. Rustin contacted Steele and others, and round-robin invitations went out from Steele, King, and Shuttlesworth to dozens of southern activists. The foundational meeting took place at the Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta on January 10 and 11, 1957, with approximately sixty people, mostly black pastors, attending. The discussions covered a wide range of topics, mostly from working papers provided by Rustin. It was agreed that the movement would be nonviolent in method and outlook and that all Americans’ rights under the Constitution would be supported in order “to redeem the soul of America.” The fact that many participants were ministers added to the emphasis upon faith and ethics. This basic reality of the Atlanta meeting was important in shaping the ethos of the emergent SCLC. The conference also cabled President Dwight D. Eisenhower, requesting that he or Vice President Richard Nixon travel to the South and take a strong stand in favor of civil rights. Eisenhower had already sent a civil rights package to Congress in 1956, but the administration’s proposals fell short of the Atlanta delegates’ expectations. Completing the Organization Later meetings in New Orleans on February 14, 1957, and in Montgomery in August of the same year completed the organizational process. After experimenting with various names, the new conference arrived at its permanent name, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, during the Montgomery meeting. Some

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SCLC leaders feared that adding the word “Christian” might alienate Jews such as Stanley Levison, but King supported the new name, believing that it reflected the true nature of the organization. Levison agreed. Some of the organizers thought that the word “Christian” would lessen the likelihood that the organization would be considered radical or communist. The Southern Christian Leadership Conference focused chiefly on basic rights for members of minorities and poor people. Its first major undertaking was a Crusade for Citizenship. Its goal was to at least double the number of registered black voters in the South. Voting rights thus became one of the major emphases of the new organization. Working in conjunction with the NAACP and other organizations, the SCLC added thousands of black voters to the voting rolls in several states. It also continued to work on behalf of ending segregated transportation, desegregating schools, and gaining broader access by African Americans to public facilities such as hotel and lunch counters. The SCLC’s loose organization was important to its distinctive role in the Civil Rights movement. Without formal individual membership, it was based on affiliates, such as local churches and activist groups like Fred Shuttlesworth’s Alabama Christian Movement for Human Rights (ACMHR). Operating at first in eleven states, it linked hundreds of such entities in a way that facilitated guidance from the central headquarters while maintaining considerable local autonomy. The SCLC came into cities and towns for campaigns when invited by local leaders. As the SCLC became more experienced and efficient, these invitations were carefully planned. The Birmingham campaign of 1963, which was a highpoint of the SCLC’s history, began on the basis of an invitation from Shuttlesworth’s organization. Priorities The SCLC’s focus was primarily on securing rights that were based on the U.S. Constitution. It was also interested, from the beginning, in economic advancement of members of minorities and perennially poor people. This aspect of the SCLC’s history had not been recognized adequately. The fact that its focus on social and economic gains increased after the Selma campaign and the

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Voting Rights Act of 1965 should not be taken as an indication that the SCLC came to this emphasis only in the middle 1960’s. Poverty was viewed by the SCLC as a seminal cause of the political powerlessness of many black Americans, and from the beginning the organization was interested in the elimination of poverty. At the same time, King and his associates recognized that the right to vote would bring the ability to help determine political leaders and hold them accountable for such needs as jobs and housing. King sounded this note as early as the Prayer Pilgrimage of May, 1957, marking the third anniversary of the Brown decision. In his speech, which propelled him higher in public visibility, he gave rhythmic repetitions of the phrase “Give us the ballot,” noting that if African Americans had the vote they could nonviolently eliminate many barriers to progress. Impact Thus began an important new organization dedicated to racial justice and advancement in the United States. It was quite different in key ways from the older NAACP and CORE, both of which began in the North and historically operated chiefly outside the South. The NAACP did have a strong presence in the South in 1957, but it was under attack by various groups and governments. Its distinguishing feature had always been litigation through the court system. The SCLC provided a framework for mass direct action, which many felt was urgently needed in the South. Furthermore, the SCLC was not a membership organization. It was structured around loosely linked “affiliates,” such as the ACMHR, rather than individual membership. The advent of the SCLC marked a new chapter in the history of racial and ethnic rights in the United States. Strongly grounded in local churches, it sought to bring their moral strength and organizational resources to bear upon the problems of members of minorities. With King as its president, it had an articulate spokesman who was increasingly drawing media interest. This was both an asset and a liability. King’s visibility helped the young SCLC but at the same time hindered the organization’s achievement of an identity apart from him. On balance, the SCLC was very significant in the continuance of the momentum gained in

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Montgomery and other cities in the early and middle 1950’s. For more than a decade under King, it would be a major force in massive campaigns in Birmingham, Selma, and other cities, and after 1965 would venture into the northern United States. Nonviolence was the most characteristic mark of the SCLC’s campaigns. At times it had remarkable results, not only for public policy but also for individual experiences of both black and white people. During the Birmingham campaign of 1963, for example, a group of marchers who were walking to a prayer vigil were confronted by Eugene “Bull” Connor’s police and firefighters, who were wielding water hoses to stop marchers. Despite Connor’s orders, those in charge of the hoses would not turn them on the unarmed and nonviolent group. They were, as Coretta Scott King later observed, disarmed by the nonviolent spirit of the demonstrators. Not hitting back, not hating, and not giving cause for increased violence were the salient features of the SCLC’s new mass-based direct action. Thomas R. Peake Further Reading Abernathy, Ralph David. And the Walls Came Tumbling Down: An Autobiography. New York: Harper & Row, 1989. This memoir by King’s close friend and successor is disappointing on the formation and early development of the SCLC, but Abernathy’s closeness to King and the early campaigns makes this a useful source for the context. Its chief value lies in giving one a firsthand view of what it was like to live through the Civil Rights movement in its heyday. Includes index and illustrations. Branch, Taylor. Parting the Waters: America in the King Years, 19541963. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1988. This massive study focuses on the period from the Brown v. Board of Education case to the March on Washington in 1963. Its chief value lies in examining the setting in which Martin Luther King, Jr., became the leading spokesperson for racial liberation and equality. Elaborately documented and sympathetically approached, it is the first of a planned two-part series on the King years. Coverage of the founding of the SCLC is marginal, but the book is

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very strong on the SCLC’s early campaigns. Contains notes, select bibliography, and index. Fairclough, Adam. To Redeem the Soul of America: The Southern Christian Leadership Conference and Martin Luther King, Jr. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1987. A detailed account of the early development of the SCLC and its historical context. A major focus is the changing role and attitudes of black clergy who played a pivotal role in the formation of the SCLC. Coverage of religious views and ideology is comparatively thin, but the book has valuable information on the internal dynamics of the SCLC. Contains detailed notes, chronologies, and index. Garrow, David J. Bearing the Cross: Martin Luther King, Jr., and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. New York: William Morrow, 1986. This Pulitzer Prize-winning account is thoroughly researched and elaborately documented. Although essentially biographical, Garrow’s study deals with far more than King’s life. It examines the campaigns, the role of the national and local governments, and the controversial personal details of King’s relations with women. Although thin on the inner spiritual struggles of King and his associates, Garrow’s is nevertheless the most detailed account to date of King’s public career. Treatment of the SCLC’s beginnings is relatively slight but useful. Contains detailed notes, illustrations, and index. Morris, Aldon D. The Origins of the Civil Rights Movement: Black Communities Organizing for Change. New York: Free Press, 1984. An excellent study of the historical and institutional foundations of the Civil Rights movement. Morris examines several local centers, such as the Montgomery Improvement Association, that converged to bring about a strong southern cooperative movement. He also explores the emergence of black ministers as pivotal figures in the new activism. His coverage is basically from 1955 to 1965. The SCLC appears as the “decentralized political arm of the black church” that translated moral principles into political activism. Includes elaborate notes, bibliography, appendices, and index. Peake, Thomas R. Keeping the Dream Alive: A History of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference from King to the Nineteen-

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Eighties. New York: Peter Lang, 1987. The first comprehensive history of the SCLC from its founding to the 1980’s, this work focuses on the motivations, programs, and training methods of the SCLC. It contains much biographical and institutional information as well as analysis of the SCLC’s religious and political concepts. Detailed notes, bibliography, illustrations, and an index. Ransby, Barbara. Ella Baker and the Black Freedom Movement: A Radical Democratic Vision. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2003. Discusses Baker’s work with the organization. Robinson, Jo Ann Gibson. The Montgomery Bus Boycott and the Women Who Started It: The Memoir of Jo Ann Gibson Robinson. Edited by David J. Garrow. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1987. A short but valuable account of the Montgomery bus boycott. Robinson, involved in the Women’s Political Council that helped to organize the boycott, underscores the personal dimensions: the emotions, the hope, and the excitement of participating in these events. See also Birmingham March; Black Christian Nationalist Movement; Black Power movement; Church bombings; Civil Rights Act of 1964; Civil Rights movement; Congress of Racial Equality; Freedom Summer; “I Have a Dream” speech; King assassination; Montgomery bus boycott; National Association for the Advancement of Colored People; Niagara Movement; Poor People’s March on Washington; Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee; University of Mississippi desegregation

Southern Manifesto Identification: Document signed by southern legislators renouncing the U.S. Supreme Court’s 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision Date: Presented to Congress on March 12, 1956 The Southern Manifesto dramatically illustrated the opposition of southern politicians to the Supreme Court’s decision declaring segregation in public schools unconstitutional.

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Following the 1954 U.S. Supreme Court decision Brown v. Board of Education, Senate Majority Leader Lyndon B. Johnson and House Speaker Sam Rayburn, both from Texas, managed to get southern and northern Democrats to restrain themselves in response to the Brown decision. In 1956, however, some southern congressmen and senators were worried about being reelected if they did not oppose the decision. Southern senators, led by Strom Thurmond of South Carolina, met and drafted a resolution criticizing the Supreme Court’s decision. The final draft of the resolution was presented to the U.S. Senate on March 12, 1956, by Walter George of Georgia. Officially called the “Declaration of Constitutional Principles,” the document stated that the U.S. Supreme Court had no legal basis for its decision and substituted its personal and political ideas for established law. It also criticized the Supreme Court’s abuse of judicial powers and commended states that had declared their intention to resist integration by any lawful means. The final document was signed by nineteen of the twenty-two southern senators and eighty-one southern House members. The three southern senators who did not sign the manifesto were Tennessee’s Estes Kefauver and Albert Gore, Sr., and Texas’s Lyndon B. Johnson. The Southern Manifesto symbolized the open defiance of the overwhelming majority of southern congressional leaders to desegregation and gave southern segregationists hope that they could successfully resist desegregation efforts. William V. Moore Further Reading Bartley, Numan V. The Rise of Massive Resistance: Race and Politics in the South During the 1950’s. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1999. Details the key events and figures in the racial events of the South. Bass, Jack, and Marilyn W. Thompson. Ol’ Strom. Atlanta, Ga.: Longstreet, 1998. Discusses Strom Thurmond’s role in the writing of the Southern Manifesto.

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See also Brown v. Board of Education; Civil Rights movement; Education; Little Rock school desegregation crisis; School desegregation; White Citizens’ Councils

Sports Although sports are often prized by fans and participants alike as a refuge from mundane concerns, the sporting world has long provided a highly public forum for the debate and resolution of social issues. Matters of race and ethnicity have long been among the most contentious of these. The rise of organized sports in the mid- to late nineteenth century coincided with the drawing of the “color line” and the institution of formalized, legally sanctioned modes of discrimination in virtually all walks of American life. In sports as in most other contexts, the most virulent discrimination has typically been directed against African Americans. Although relations between whites, Latinos, Native Americans, Jews, and members of other ethnic minorities would often be strained, both on the playing fields and in the stands, such tensions historically have been relatively minor in comparison to the intense feelings aroused by the participation of black athletes. As one baseball historian has remarked, “With the breaking of the color barrier, other ethnic identities ceased to have much meaning. . . . where the Blacks were, everybody else was just White”—a statement that encapsulates the history of race relations not only in baseball but also in most other American sports. By the latter half of the twentieth century, the integration of most sports was an accomplished fact, but other issues of race and ethnicity continued to swirl around the world of sports. Baseball and Discrimination in Team Sports Baseball, the most popular and most widely played team sport of nineteenth century America, was also the first major sport to attain a secure organizational footing in North America, and in many respects, it long set the pattern for other American sports.

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In the early years of organized baseball, a certain degree of racial freedom prevailed on American playing fields; although African Americans, Native Americans, and members of other ethnic minorities did not commonly compete with white players, neither was their participation formally barred. All-black teams occasionally played all-white squads, and African Americans, Latinos, and Native Americans competed with whites in front of racially mixed audiences in the earliest professional leagues. By the waning years of the nineteenth century, however, such tolerance was becoming increasingly rare. As white America grappled with the changed legal and social status of African Americans in the post-Civil War period, segregated facilities and institutions were established in virtually all walks of American life. In 1896, the U.S. Supreme Court gave its blessing to such arrangements by endorsing the “separate but equal” doctrine in the landmark case Plessy v. Ferguson. Segregationists had their way in organized baseball as well, and by the century’s close, African Americans had been effectively excluded from the sport’s highest levels by means of an unwritten but nevertheless effective agreement among team owners and managers. (Sole responsibility for adoption of the ban is often assigned to Adrian “Cap” Anson, a star player and manager and a vocal proponent of segregation. Such an assessment, however, oversimplifies the reality; although Anson was one of the game’s leading figures, he was only one among many who worked to exclude African Americans from the sport. African Americans were being systematically separated from whites in education, housing, and virtually every other arena, and the segregation of the country’s most popular spectator sport was virtually inevitable.) Native Americans and Latinos No such restrictions, however, were placed on the participation of Native Americans and light-skinned Latinos in organized baseball. Louis “Jud” Castro, for example, an infielder from Colombia, played in the inaugural season of the American League in 1902, and such Native Americans as Jim Thorpe and Albert “Chief” Bender had successful major league careers in the first decades of the twentieth century. As a consequence, white man-

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agers and owners made occasional attempts to pass off talented African American players as “Indians” or “Cubans”; legendary manager John McGraw, for example, tried unsuccessfully to play infielder Charlie Grant under the allegedly Cherokee name Charlie Tokohamo. Although white teams sometimes played exhibitions against black teams, and although players of all races competed together in Latin America, the color line had been firmly drawn. For more than a half century, no openly African American players were permitted in the white professional leagues. Moreover, although light-skinned Latinos and Native Americans were not barred from the white leagues, they commonly experienced the same slights and racist treatments accorded members of ethnic minorities in all facets of American life—a fact perhaps reflected by the patronizing nicknames given even to star players; the nickname “Chief,” for example, was routinely applied to Native American players, while Jewish players were often nicknamed “Moe.” In addition to Bender and Thorpe, Native American pioneers included John “Chief” Meyers, a star catcher for the New York Giants; the most successful Latino player of the early century was Adolpho “Dolf” Luque, a Cuban American pitcher also nicknamed “the Pride of Havana.” (In the early part of the century, when many Americans were first- or second-generation European immigrants, ethnic identification was strong even among white players, and the achievements of athletes of Irish, Italian, German, Polish, or Jewish ancestry were celebrated by their respective communities to an extent unknown to later generations. Nicknames that called attention to a player’s ethnicity were common; German American superstar Honus Wagner, for example, was known as “the Flying Dutchman.”) Breaking the Color Line Barred from the white leagues, African American professionals competed against one another in the Negro Leagues, a loose association of teams that flourished in the first half of the twentieth century. Negro League stars such as Oscar Charleston, Josh Gibson, Satchel Paige, and Buck Leonard were widely regarded

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as the equals of the best white players, but they were allowed to compete against them only in exhibitions, barnstorming tours, and foreign leagues. In 1946, however, in a move that would have repercussions well beyond baseball or sports in general, baseball’s color line was broken by Brooklyn Dodgers executive Branch Rickey, who signed Jackie Robinson, a rising star in the Negro Leagues, to a minor league contract. Robinson reached the majors the following season. Though he endured taunts and harassment both on and off the field, he quickly attained stardom (among Robinson’s notable supporters was Hank Greenberg, a Jewish superstar who had long crusaded against anti-Semitism). Robinson’s on-field success was matched by the remarkable dignity and restraint with which he bore the torrents of abuse directed at him, and his shining example deprived baseball’s powers of any further excuse for continuing to segregate the sport. A flood of talented black players entered the white leagues, and every major league team was integrated by 1958. As a consequence, the Negro Leagues, deprived of their reason for existing, soon shriveled and disappeared. Football When the color line was drawn in baseball, football was in its infancy, and professional structures did not exist. In the early years of the sport’s evolution, however, a number of black players excelled at the collegiate level, often while playing for such allblack schools as Howard and Tuskegee Universities. Several black players, moreover, attained collegiate stardom at predominantly white schools; William Henry Lewis was named an All-American in 1892 and 1893 while playing for Amherst, and Paul Robeson starred for Rutgers before becoming famous as a singer and actor. When the first professional leagues were formed in the 1920’s, moreover, no color line existed, and Robeson, Brown University graduate Frederick Douglass “Fritz” Pollard, and University of Iowa product Fred “Duke” Slater, among others, were among the best of the early professionals. In the early 1930’s, however, professional football followed baseball’s lead and excluded black players. Notable early players of other ethnic backgrounds in-

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cluded Jewish stars Sid Luckman and Bennie Friedman and the multitalented Native American Thorpe, whose football achievements surpassed his baseball success. At the same time that Robinson was integrating baseball to great publicity, the established National Football League (NFL) had to fend off a challenge from the upstart All-America Football Conference, which signed a number of black players in an effort to compete with the older league. Faced with these twin pressures, the NFL owners rescinded their ban on black players. As in baseball, African Americans soon came to play important roles on every professional team. Basketball Basketball, like football, was slow to develop viable professional structures. As in football, therefore, the collegiate level of play was the highest level widely available; although black teams were generally unable to play white opponents, basketball flourished at black colleges. Before the formation of solid professional leagues, traveling professional teams played all comers; among the most successful of these teams were the all-black Harlem Renaissance (or “Rens”) and the Harlem Globetrotters. Both teams enjoyed success against white competition; in order, in part, to deflect hostility from white crowds, the Globetrotters learned to supplement their play with minstrel-like antics, and the team eventually evolved into an entertainment vehicle rather than a competitive unit. Jewish players and teams were also important to the rise of the sport, and such stars as Moe Goldman, Red Holtzman, and Eddie Gottlieb endured anti-Semitic taunts from opposing teams and crowds while helping to establish the basis for the first successful professional leagues. Prior to 1950, African Americans were excluded from the National Basketball Association (NBA) and its predecessor organizations. That year, three African Americans were signed by NBA teams; within two decades, African American players would come to dominate the sport. Segregation at the college level would persist for decades, as a number of southern schools refused to use black players or to play against integrated teams. In 1966, in a game sometimes referred to as “the Brown v. Board of Ed-

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ucation of college basketball,” an all-black Texas Western team defeated all-white, heavily favored Kentucky for the national collegiate championship. Individual and Olympic Sports Sports based on individual excellence rather than on team play have historically proven somewhat less amenable to overt racism than structured team and league sports; in addition, international competitions such as the Olympic Games have been relatively unaffected by parochial color lines. Nevertheless, issues of race have repeatedly reared their heads in international and individual sports. White boxing champions of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries often refused to fight black competitors, and the 1908 capture of the world heavyweight championship by Jack Johnson, a flamboyant African American who flouted convention by consorting with white women, led to a prolonged search for a “Great White Hope” who could humble Johnson (who was concurrently persecuted by police).

Heavyweight boxing champion Joe Louis sews technical-sergeant stripes onto his uniform while serving in the U.S. Army during World War II. (National Archives)

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Muhammad Ali. (Library of Congress)

In contrast, the midcentury heavyweight champion Joe Louis was applauded by many whites for his humility; when successors such as the irrepressible Muhammad Ali refused to defer to white sensibilities, racial alarms again were sounded. Among his many celebrated and controversial actions, Ali in 1964 became the first of many prominent black athletes to change his birth name (Cassius Clay) to a name reflecting his African heritage. Among other individual sports, the “elitist” games of tennis and golf have proven least amenable to widescale integration. In part, this state of affairs has reflected economic realities, as relatively few minority competitors have been able to afford the club memberships and private instruction that most successful players require. Yet the intractability of racist sentiment has played an undeniable part in limiting minority success in both sports. Tennis stars of the 1950’s and 1960’s such as the Latino legend Pancho Gonzales and the African Americans Althea Gibson and Arthur Ashe often had to battle for permission to compete at race-restricted tournaments and clubs as did leading black golfers

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such as Lee Elder and Calvin Peete. Even after the resounding successes of golfing sensation Tiger Woods brought legions of new minority fans and players to the sport in the mid-1990’s, country clubs across the United States—including some at which leading tournaments were held—refused to admit minority members. International competitions such as the Olympic Games have traditionally been more open to minority participation. George Poage in 1904 became the first African American Olympic medalist, and Thorpe, generally acclaimed the world’s greatest athlete, won two gold medals at the 1912 Games. In 1936, the African American track star Jesse Owens won four gold medals at the Berlin Olympics, to the chagrin of the Nazi hosts who hoped to use the Games to demonstrate Aryan supremacy. In 1968, many of the top African American athletes refused to participate in the Games, and two, sprinters John Carlos and Tommie Smith, engendered a worldwide controversy by giving a “black power salute” and refusing to acknowledge the U.S. national anthem while receiving their medals (they were subsequently stripped of their medals and removed from the Olympic team). Other Controversies As the integration of most sports at the playing level became an accomplished fact, questions of race and ethnicity in the sports world came increasingly to focus on other issues. Perhaps the most persistent of these was the fact that although members of minorities had made vital contributions as athletes in every major sport, only a handful had risen to fill managerial, administrative, and executive positions. In 1987, a furor erupted when Los Angeles Dodgers executive Al Campanis—who, ironically, had been a teammate and longtime friend of Jackie Robinson—told a television interviewer that African Americans were underrepresented in front-office sports jobs because they “lack the necessities” to fill such positions. Although many commentators dismissed Campanis’s remarks as the confused, out-of-context ramblings of a tired old man, the incident touched off a round of recriminations and investigations.

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Although baseball and other sports appointed panels to study the situation, more than a decade later, members of minorities had yet to achieve more than token representation in the power structures of most American sports. A similar reception greeted golfer Fuzzy Zoeller’s indiscreet 1997 remarks that Tiger Woods, who is partly of African American heritage, might have a preference for stereotypically “black” foods such as watermelon and fried chicken. These and other such incidents served as ongoing reminders that racial and ethnic divisions persist in the world of sports to the same extent as they do elsewhere in American society. Glenn Canyon Further Reading Alan H. Levy’s Tackling Jim Crow: Racial Segregation in Professional Football (Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland & Co, 2003) provides an analysis of the segregation and integration of the National Football League. Brad Snyder’s Beyond the Shadow of the Senators: The Untold Story of the Homestead Grays and the Integration of Baseball (Chicago: Contemporary Books, 2003) is a valuable addition to literature on African Americans and baseball. Negro League Baseball: The Rise and Ruin of a Black Institution (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004), by Neil Lanctot, is an excellent examination of the Negro Leagues. Calvin H. Sinnette’s Forbidden Fairways: African Americans and the Game of Golf (Chelsea, Mich.: Sleeping Bear Press, 1998) is a welcome addition to the topic. Arthur Ashe’s A Hard Road to Glory: A History of the African American Athlete Since 1946 (New York: Warner Books, 1988) is a thorough overview of the black legacy to American sport; two companion volumes carry the discussion back to the earliest days of American history. Sociologist Harry Edwards, who was hired by major league baseball as a consultant in the wake of the Campanis incident, has written numerous thought-provoking analyses of race and sports; his groundbreaking The Sociology of Sport (1973) remains useful. The Bill James Historical Baseball Abstract (Rev. ed., New York: Villard Books, 1988) is a fascinating miscellany with many insightful comments of the history of race relations in the “national pastime.” Robert Peterson’s Only the

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Ball Was White (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1970) was the first and is still among the best of the many histories of the Negro Leagues. See also Baseball’s integration; Segregation; Stereotypes

Stereotypes Definition: Popular, and usually biased, notions about African Americans held by others A number of stereotypes regarding African Americans, positive and negative, impair intergroup relations because they cause people to view all African Americans as being the same rather than possessing individual traits and characteristics. Over the years, a number of stereotypes have developed concerning African Americans. Some of these stereotypes—earth mother/mammy, natural musician, and super athlete—have basically positive connotations; however, others—Sambo, Uncle Tom, sexual predator, smart-mouthed but clever adolescent, welfare queen—have primarily negative connotations. Negative stereotypes are obviously detrimental, but even their positive counterparts are destructive and dangerous because they create the expectation that all members of a group will be able to achieve certain feats or will act in certain ways. These sorts of expectations place excessive pressure on those who cannot or do not want to live up to the stereotype. Early Stereotypes During slavery, African Americans were often viewed as “Sambos,” or mentally inferior, lazy people, usually cheerful and childlike, a characterization that made slavery more palatable to its practitioners. Three other early stereotypes cast African American men as sexual predators (“bucks”) or Uncle Toms and women as mammies, or nurturing earth mothers. Both whites and African Americans used the term “Uncle Tom” to refer to an African American man (occasionally a woman)

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who gives in readily to demands made by members of the dominant white group. This term is often said to have originated with Harriet Beecher Stowe’s 1852 novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin; however, the term probably entered popular culture as a result of George L. Aiken’s Tom Shows (1852), a crude and violent traveling show that presented caricatures of both slaves and slave owners. The stereotypical depiction of an African American woman as a mammy, a sort of earth mother selflessly caring for children, probably originated because so many African American women cared for the children of white plantation owners. The mammy figure was popularized by Margaret Mitchell’s 1936 novel Gone with the Wind, which was made into an Academy Award-winning movie. Another early stereotype was the portrayal of African American men as sexual predators, or black “bucks,” who would attack any white woman they encountered. This stereotype, born of white fears about the mixing of races, forced many African American men in the Deep South to be very careful in their attitude toward and dealings with white women from shortly after emancipation through the second half of the twentieth century. The

One of the most persistent stereotypes of African American women is that of the black “mammy”— a woman selflessly devoted to caring for her white master’s children. (Library of Congress)

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Black “Brute” and “Buck” Stereotypes To help counter growing African American political power and freedoms after Reconstruction, some white southerners justified a wave of terrorism and lynching by creating new stereotypes of black male brutality. The black “brute” stereotype was a figure who was inhumanly brutal, and the “buck” was a figure who combined brutality and sexual monstrosity and who desired nothing more than to rape white women. These stereotypes found their clearest early expression in the novels of Thomas Dixon and in D. W. Griffith’s 1915 film Birth of a Nation, which was based on Dixon’s novel The Clansman (1905). Although only a minority of male lynching victims were charged with rape—and many of even those allegations were false—the stereotypes were important to lynching’s public defenders, who insisted that lynching was necessary to defend the supposed purity of white womanhood. One of the most important strategies for antilynching activists and organizations, such as the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, was to attempt to undermine public support for lynching by debunking the stereotype of the black rapist. Controversy surrounding the use of black “brute” and “buck” stereotypes in a variety of modern arenas (including media and national politics) remains an important area of racial discourse in the twenty-first century. Jonathan Markovitz

slightest suspicion of sexual relations between a black man and a white woman could mean legal problems and even physical danger (lynching) for an African American man. Modern Stereotypes In the second half of the twentieth century, some of the early stereotypes diminished in intensity and others persisted in a somewhat altered form. For example, although the Sambo image faded, African Americans were still commonly believed to be mentally inferior to whites. These old stereotypes were, however, joined by new ones that were adopted and popularized by the media. Typically, the African Americans who appeared in

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films and television programs in the 1950’s and early 1960’s portrayed one-dimensional characters who embodied common stereotypes. One stereotype that developed in this period was of the African American as a super athlete. The success of African American athletes such as baseball player Willie Mays, football star Jim Brown, and boxers such as Joe Louis and Muhammad Ali (Cassius Clay) led many Americans to believe that all African Americans possessed super athletic abilities. Another common stereotype viewed all African Americans as having a superior sense of rhythm that produced excellent music and made them skillful dancers. Although much of the music regarded as American—jazz, blues, gospel, and rock—has its origins in African American culture and thus can be regarded as a product of African Americans, it is a mistake to project this level of musical talent onto all members of the group. Also, the stereotype ignores the historical and cultural reasons behind the creation of these musical genres. Likewise, although some African Americans possess an excellent sense of rhythm and are extremely skilled dancers, not all members of the group are similarly talented. A common stereotype often exploited by the media is that of the street-smart, wisecracking, slightly goofy male adolescent (or young adult) African American. This cynical, know-it-all attitude is common among teenage boys or young men, but the stereotype turns it into an African American characteristic, often depicting the young black adolescent as a gang member. Of course some African American adolescents belong to gangs, but adolescents from numerous other racial and ethnic groups also join gangs. The welfare queen—a woman who refuses to work and maintains an “upscale” lifestyle through unfair use of welfare—is a new twist on the stereotype that African Americans are slothful, childlike people. Welfare queens, usually single mothers, are depicted as lazy, perhaps immoral women who are having babies to increase the amount of their welfare check and to avoid working. In fact, in 1993, more white women were receiving welfare benefits than were African American women. Annita Marie Ward

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Further Reading Louise Kidder discusses stereotypes in The Psychology of Intergroup Relations: Conflict and Consciousness (New York: McGrawHill, 1975). Barbara Rollock discusses the portrayal of African Americans in The Black Experience in Children’s Books (New York: New York Public Library, 1984). Well-known journalist Carl Thomas Rowan tells what it is like to deal with racial barriers and stereotypes in Breaking Barriers: A Memoir (Boston: Little, Brown, 1991). Other books that deal with the African American experience and stereotypes include Frank L. Keegan’s Blacktown, USA (Boston: Little, Brown, 1971), Gordon Parks’s Born Black (Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1971), and Louise Meriwether’s Don’t Ride the Bus on Mondays: The Rosa Parks Story (Englewood Cliffs, N. J.: Prentice Hall, 1973). See also Black Is Beautiful movement; Cowboys; Film history; Literature; Music; Slavery and race relations; Sports; Tuskegee experiment

Stono Rebellion The Event: Major slave rebellion Date: September 9, 1739 Place: St. Paul’s Parish near the Stono River, twenty miles from Charles Town, South Carolina The success of the Stono Rebellion triggered other slave insurrections, forcing white settlers to organize to prevent further slave uprisings. Conditions in South Carolina during the 1730’s led to white fear of slave uprisings. The high numbers of Africans imported through Charles Town port led to legislation against Africans congregating, holding meetings, and appearing in public after night hours. Charles Town had a watch committee to guard the port city, and the rest of the colony had a white patrol system to police Africans in militia districts. South Carolina used public punishment as a deterrent. Contrary to their intent, these white controls increasingly led to greater resistance from newly imported Africans. Cases of ver-

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bal insolence joined arson as a recurring feature of colonial life. Whites blamed illnesses and deaths on African knowledge of plants and their poisonous powers. In the 1730’s, massive importations from the Congo-Angola region meant that more than half of the colony’s slaves had been there fewer than ten years. Slave unrest was blamed on outside agitators—Native Americans with assistance from both the Spanish and French. Rumors of a Spanish invasion increased after the Spanish king granted liberty to African fugitive slaves in 1733. Prelude to Rebellion Tension thus was high in 1739. Then, a smallpox epidemic, coupled with the escape of slaves to Spanish Florida, led to massive loss of investments. A yellow fever epidemic hit during the summer months. In the fall, deaths decreased with the return of cool weather, but the situation was ripe for insurrection. Since Sundays afforded slaves their best opportunity for meeting in communal activities, the legislature passed the Security Act in August, 1739, requiring all white men to carry firearms to churches beginning September 29 or pay a stiff fine. News of conflict between England and Spain reached Charles Town the weekend before the uprising began, explaining why the Stono Rebellion began immediately without betrayal, caught white masters in church unarmed, and had slaves marching toward Spanish St. Augustine. The insurrection included elements typical of early rebellions in South Carolina: total surprise, brutal killings, extensive property damage, armed fighting, and extended consequences. On the morning of September 9, 1739, twenty slaves, mostly Angolans, gathered in St. Paul’s Parish near the Stono River, twenty miles from Charles Town. Led by a slave named Jemmy, the group broke into Hutchenson’s store near the Stono Bridge to gather guns and ammunition. Storekeepers Robert Bathurst and Mr. Gibbs were beheaded. The slave band moved on to the Godfrey house, killing the family, gathering supplies, and burning the building. The slaves took the main road to Georgia, stopping at Wallace’s Tavern but sparing the innkeeper, who was known to be a kind master. His white neighbor, however, lost his life, along with his wife and child. The band continued, sacking

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and burning houses on Pons Pons Road and killing all the white occupants. Slave owner Thomas Rose was successfully hidden by his slaves as the band moved through. The group’s numbers grew as reluctant slaves were forced to join. Increased numbers led to diminished discipline. The group took up a banner, beat on two drums, and shouted, “Liberty!” They pursued and killed any whites they encountered. Lieutenant Governor William Bull and four other white men were traveling to Charles Town for legislative session when they encountered the rebel slaves. They escaped to warn others. By late Sunday afternoon, the band of nearly one hundred rebel slaves stopped in an open field, showing their confidence and hoping to be joined by other slaves by morning. Nearby, white colonists had been alerted by Sunday afternoon and had organized an armed and mounted resistance of somewhere between twenty and one hundred men. Moving to the field, the white forces caught the slaves off guard, killing or wounding at least fourteen rebels. They surrounded other rebels, who were briefly questioned before being shot to death. They released the slaves who had been forced to participate. Almost onethird of the rebelling slaves escaped the fighting. Some returned to their plantations, hoping not to be missed. Upon their return, planters cut off their heads and placed them on posts to serve as a reminder for other slaves seeking freedom. The white colony engaged in an intensive manhunt to recapture those participants who remained at large. Whites armed themselves, and guards were posted at ferry posts. By some accounts, twenty to forty rebels were captured, hanged, disemboweled, or beaten within the two following days. Another account, a month later, reported the rebels had been stopped from doing further mischief by having been “put to the most cruel Death.” The Georgia general James Oglethorpe called out rangers and American Indians, garrisoned soldiers at Palachicolas—a fort guarding the only point on the Savannah River where fugitives could cross—and issued a proclamation for whites to keep a watchful eye on any Africans. Despite these acts of retribution and retaliation against both free African Americans and slaves, white fears did not subside.

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Most whites thought persons of African descent were dangerous and possessed of a rebellious nature. By the fall of 1739, many planters near Stono had moved their wives and children in with other families for greater security. The Assembly placed a special patrol along the Stono River. Outlying fugitives were still being brought in for execution by early 1740. Finally, two fugitive slaves seeking a large reward captured the last remaining leader, who had been at large for three years following the insurrection. Aftermath The white minority responded to the Stono Rebellion in several ways. First, the colony tightened restrictions on all African Americans, giving South Carolina the harshest penalties of any mainland colony. The colony also sought to improve conditions that provoked rebellion. Finally, the colony sought to lessen the influence of the Spanish settlement in St. Augustine as a constant source of incitement. The war against the Spanish curbed that stimulant. The white minority also tried to correct the numerical racial imbalance. A prohibitive duty on new slave imports cut the rate of importation from one thousand per year in 1730 to one hundred per year by 1740. Collected duties went to recruit white immigrants. The legislature required one white man present for every ten Africans on a plantation. Fines from this infraction went to fund additional patrols. The government intensified efforts to control the behavior of slaves. Through the Negro Act of 1740, the legislators shaped the core of the South Carolina slave codes for more than a century. Masters who failed to retain control of slaves received fines. The right to manumit slaves was taken out of the hands of owners and turned over to the legislature. No longer could slaves have such personal liberties as freedom of movement, of education, of assembly, to raise food, and to earn money. Surveillance of African American activity increased. Slaves received rewards for informing on the actions of other slaves. The legislature discouraged the presence of free blacks in the colony. The white minority developed several strategies of calculated benevolence. The government assessed penalties on masters

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known for excessive labor requirements or brutality of punishments for their slaves. A school was founded in Charles Town to train slaves to teach other slaves about selective Christian principles requiring submission and obedience. These efforts did not lessen white dependency on African labor. Machines did not supplant their labor until after the American Revolution. White immigration did not increase substantially, despite offers of free land on the frontier. High duties reduced the importation of slaves, but the racial proportions varied slightly from those prior to insurrection. The suppression of the Stono Rebellion was a significant turning point for the white minority. White factions had to cooperate to maintain the English colony. Techniques used to maintain white control shaped the race relations and history of South Carolina. The heightened degree of white repression and the reduction in African autonomy created a new social equilibrium in the generation before the American Revolution. Dorothy C. Salem Further Reading Aptheker, Herbert. American Negro Slave Revolts. Rev. ed. New York: Columbia University Press, 1969. The pioneering work on slave revolts. Jordan, Winthrop. White over Black: American Attitudes Toward the Negro, 1550-1812. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1968. Discusses how slave revolts influenced the status of both slaves and free blacks in the United States. Kilson, Martin. “Toward Freedom: An Analysis of Slave Revolts in the United States.” Phylon 25 (1964): 175-189. Analyzes the distribution of slave revolts and the environments that contributed to their occurrence. Wood, Peter H. Black Majority: Negroes in Colonial South Carolina from 1670 Through the Stono Rebellion. New York: W. W. Norton, 1974. Examines the patterns of white control and African resistance within the socioeconomic context of colonial South Carolina. Both a narrative and an analysis of the event and its effects on the colony.

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See also Amistad slave revolt; New York City slave revolt; Slavery; Slavery and race relations; Slavery and the justice system; Slavery in Virginia; Turner’s slave insurrection

Strauder v. West Virginia The Case: U.S. Supreme Court ruling on jury composition Date: March 1, 1880 The Supreme Court declared that exclusion of African Americans from juries was a violation of the equal protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. During the late nineteenth century, West Virginia had a statute that explicitly limited jury service to “white male persons.” Strauder, a black man convicted of murder, claimed that he had not received a fair trial because of the statute. The Supreme Court agreed. Writing for a 7-2 majority, Justice William Strong explained that such a law constituted precisely the kind of discrimination that the Fourteenth Amendment was designed to prevent. Also in 1880, the Court decided three other important cases dealing with racial exclusion from juries. In Neal v. Delaware and Ex parte Virginia, it held that even if the state’s laws did not exclude blacks, the actual practice of exclusion was a denial of equal protection. In Virginia v. Rives, however, the Court ruled that the mere absence of African Americans from juries was not in itself a violation of the Fourteenth Amendment. In effect, Rives allowed local officials to use their discretionary authority to exclude African Americans from juries. Although Strauder, Ex Parte Virginia, and Neal had limited impact during the Jim Crow era, they nevertheless helped prepare a constitutional foundation for the Civil Rights movement of the mid-twentieth century. Thomas Tandy Lewis See also Batson v. Kentucky; Edmonson v. Leesville Concrete Company; Powers v. Ohio; Williams v. Mississippi

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Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee Identification: National civil rights organization also known by its acronym, SNCC (pronounced “snick”) Date: Founded in April, 1960 Place: Raleigh, North Carolina As tensions mounted during in the mid-1960’s, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee became increasingly aggressive and eventually dropped its nonviolent stance. In early 1960, amid a growing number of student civil rights demonstrations, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), led by Martin Luther King, Jr., encouraged students to convene their own organization. In response to the call, a group of student leaders, under the guidance of Ella Baker, a former administrative head of SCLC, formed the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. Committed at the outset to nonviolence, SNCC was designed to be thoroughly democratic and to function independently from mainstream groups, including the SCLC. It also became a biracial organization although initially there was some concern that allowing white students to join SNCC might compromise the organization. Direct Action Despite its nonviolent philosophy, SNCC was often very aggressive and confrontational in attacking segregation. The organization took on several of the more dangerous civil rights battles including voter registration campaigns in Alabama and Mississippi. Numerous times SNCC activists were badly beaten, and in the summer of 1964, three activists who had joined the SNCC campaign—Michael Schwerner, Andrew Goodman, and James Chaney—were brutally murdered by southern segregationists including members of the Ku Klux Klan. Nevertheless, SNCC continued its confrontational strategy.

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By 1964, frustrated by the slow pace of change and apparent lack of support from the federal government, SNCC members began to splinter into two factions. One group sought to maintain the organization’s original principles, and the other chose to reconsider the group’s nonviolent approach. Racial tensions within the organization further divided SNCC. African American volunteers were concerned that their white counterparts were taking control of the organization, and white members were growing more critical of SNCC leadership. Amid the internal tensions, many SNCC members became increasingly radical. During the mid-1960’s, SNCC members, under the charismatic leadership of Stokely Carmichael, embraced a new creed of black power. The slogan became a call for economic self-determination and political activism as well as a symbol of black militancy. Carmichael believed that change would come only through dramatic, confrontational appeals. The evolving SNCC philosophy advocated responding to violence with violence. The increasingly strident rhetoric led some members to abandon the organization, but at the same time, it attracted new membership,

H. Rap Brown, the leader of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee in 1967, at a press conference. (Library of Congress)

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particularly radical, northern, urban African Americans. Further demonstrating its new direction, SNCC shifted its activities from voting rights and educational issues in the rural South to conditions in urban ghettos. Decline SNCC, plagued by ineffective leadership and constant internal divisions, saw its membership dwindle to a handful of activists by 1968. The organization was further undermined by its entering into a formal alliance with the Black Panthers and by concern that the organization associated with other paramilitary groups. The last two SNCC chapters, Atlanta and New York, ceased operation in early 1970. SNCC activists helped to focus the nation on the problem of institutionalized racism by taking a leading role in several major civil rights demonstrations during the 1960’s. In 1961, SNCC members helped the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) operate Freedom Rides that challenged the constitutionality of segregated interstate busing laws in the South. The rides attracted much media coverage, which brought the Civil Rights movement into middle-class white suburban homes for the first time and helped pressure President John F. Kennedy into paying more attention to civil rights issues. The rides were immediately followed by the Albany, Georgia, demonstrations, in which SNCC members sat in whites-only sections of local bus stations to test interstate transportation laws that made segregated facilities illegal. In 1964, SNCC organized a voter registration and educational campaign in Mississippi. A biracial effort carried out by college student volunteers, the second phase of the campaign, in which young workers were to educate voters, became known as Freedom Summer. This campaign further enlightened Americans about the plight of African Americans in the South. The student volunteers who participated in the campaign were able to register more than seventeen thousand African American voters and provided more than three thousand children with educational instruction. The efforts, however, came at a price. During the summer, at least sixty-seven bombings and arson fires

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were directed at the volunteers. In one incident, three activists, Schwerner, Goodman, and Chaney, were killed. That same summer, SNCC helped organize the forming of the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party, which challenged the credentials of the Mississippi delegation to the 1964 Democratic National Convention when it met to nominate Lyndon B. Johnson. SNCC members were also among the organizers and participants in most of the civil rights marches during the mid-1960’s, including the March on Washington in 1963 and the march from Selma to Montgomery in 1965. Though SNCC disbanded early in the 1970’s, several of the organization’s leaders and former members remained activists on both the local and national levels well into the 1970’s. Among the more notable former SNCC members are James Forman, who became involved in African American economic development; John Lewis, who in 1988 won election to the House of Representatives; Charles Sherrod, who was elected mayor of Albany, Georgia; and Robert Moses, who became director of a nationwide literacy program. Other former members became involved in protesting the Vietnam War and in the women’s rights movement. Paul E. Doutrich Further Reading Barbara Ransby’s Ella Baker and the Black Freedom Movement: A Radical Democratic Vision (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2003) discusses the impact of SNCC and Baker’s work with the organization. Howard Zinn’s SNCC: The New Abolitionists (Cambridge, Mass.: South End Press, 2002) provides a notable study of the organization. In 1998, Cheryl Lynn Greenberg edited a collection entitled A Circle of Trust: Remembering SNCC (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1998). A personal memoir is available in The River of No Return: The Autobiography of a Black Militant and the Life and Death of SNCC (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1990), by Cleveland Sellers with Robert Terrell. Clayborne Carson’s In Struggle: SNCC and the Black Awakening of the 1960’s (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1995) discusses SNCC’s role in the context of the Civil Rights movement in the South.

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See also Birmingham March; “Black Manifesto”; Black Panther Party; Black Power movement; Chicago riots; Civil Rights movement; Civil rights worker murders; Congress of Racial Equality; Freedom Rides; Freedom Summer; Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party; Southern Christian Leadership Conference

Summit Meeting of National Negro Leaders The Event: Meeting between major African American leaders and President Dwight D. Eisenhower Date: June, 1958 Place: Washington, D.C. This meeting between President Dwight D. Eisenhower and national African American leaders was the first and last White House conference with black leaders during the Eisenhower administration; later requests for meetings were denied. After five years in office and repeated requests from civil rights activists for an audience, U.S. president Dwight D. Eisenhower held a “summit meeting” in June, 1958, with four African American leaders: Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.; A. Philip Randolph; Roy Wilkins of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People; and Lester B. Granger of the National Urban League. The purpose of the summit was to address strategies for dealing with the approaching wave of school integration and to express concerns over the reluctance of the Eisenhower administration to support civil rights and enforce court orders mandating desegregated public schools; yet the significance of the summit lay in the fact that it was Eisenhower’s first such meeting with black leaders. The meeting itself was by all accounts brief and uneventful. The leaders presented Eisenhower with a carefully worded statement calling for increased federal visibility and involvement in advancing civil rights causes and tactfully criticized the president for his previous statement urging them to “be patient” about civil

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rights. Eisenhower promised the leaders that he would take their statement under consideration but responded evasively to their requests for a national conference on civil rights. Michael H. Burchett See also Black cabinet; Civil Rights movement; Congressional Black Caucus

Swann v. Charlotte-Mecklenberg Board of Education The Case: U.S. Supreme Court ruling on school integration and busing Date: April 20, 1971 The Supreme Court ruled that federal courts may order local school boards to use extensive busing plans to desegregate schools whenever racial segregation had been supported by public policy. The original catalyst for this case was the plan of the school board of Charlotte, Mecklenberg County, North Carolina, to close some African American schools, create attendance zones for most of the schools in the district, and allow a “freedom-of-choice” provision under which students could transfer to any school in the district, provided that they could furnish their own transportation and the school was not already filled to capacity. The litigation began on January 19, 1965, when eleven African American families, including Vera and Darius Swann and their son James, were convinced by attorney Julius L. Chambers to sue the district for relief. The plaintiffs challenged the plan on the premise that the closing of the African American schools would place the burden of desegregation on the African American students, and that the other features would only perpetuate segregation. The Appellate Process In 1965, federal district court judge J. Braxton Craven rejected the plaintiff’s challenge and approved the school board’s plan. A

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year later, the Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit affirmed Craven’s ruling. At this point, Chambers opted not to appeal to the Supreme Court, because he feared that the Court would only affirm the lower rulings under the precedents established at that time. After the Supreme Court’s ruling in Green v. County School Board of New Kent County, Virginia in 1968, however, Chambers decided to petition for further relief. In Green, the justices ruled that freedom-of-choice plans did not aid in the process of desegregation, and that other methods must be used to comply with Brown v. Board of Education (1954). On September 6, 1968, the Swann plaintiffs filed a motion for further relief in the federal district court in Charlotte. The motion came before Judge James B. McMillan. Both parties agreed that the school system fell short of achieving the unitary status required by Green. Two plans were submitted, one by the school board and the other by a court-appointed expert from Rhode Island College, Dr. John Finger. Judge McMillan essentially accepted the Finger plan, which required more desegregation than the school board was willing to accept. The board plan would have closed seven schools and reassigned the students involved. Attendance zones were to be restructured to achieve greater racial balance, but the existing grade structures were left intact. Furthermore, the board plan would modify the free transfer plan into an optional majority-tominority transfer system (students in a racial majority in one school could transfer to another where they would be in the minority). Under the board plan, African American students would be reassigned to nine of the ten high schools in the district, thereby producing in each an African American population of between 17 and 36 percent. The tenth high school would have an African American population of 2 percent. The junior high schools would be rezoned so that all but one would have from none to 38 percent African Americans. One junior high school would have an African American population of 90 percent. Attendance at the elementary schools, however, still would be based primarily on the neighborhood concept. More than half the African American

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children at this level would remain in schools that were between 86 and 100 percent black. The Finger plan used the board zoning plan for high schools, with one modification. Three hundred additional African American students would be transported to the nearly all-white Independence High School. This plan dealt similarly with the junior high schools. Nine satellite zones would be created, and innercity African American students would be assigned to nine outlying, predominantly white junior high schools. As was typically the case, the biggest controversy concerned the elementary school students. Rather than simply relying on zoning, Finger proposed that pairing and grouping techniques be used as well, with the result that all elementary schools would have a black student proportion that would range from 9 to 38 percent. Pairing occurs when two schools, one predominantly white and one predominantly black, are combined by either sending half the students in one school to the other for all grades or by sending all the children to one school for certain grades and then to the other school for the remaining grade levels. Bus transportation would be used for the affected students. After the district court’s busing order, McMillan was hanged in effigy. Crowds demonstrated at the courthouse, in front of the judge’s house, and at the Charlotte Observer, a newspaper that had supported busing. McMillan and his family received threatening phone calls, his law office was fire-bombed by an arsonist, his car was dynamited, and his home was vandalized. New Appeals The Charlotte-Mecklenberg Board of Education appealed McMillan’s busing order to the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals. The appellate court vacated McMillan’s order respecting elementary schools, and affirmed his ruling only on the secondary school plans. This time, because of the Green case, Chambers appealed the decision to the Supreme Court. By the time the Supreme Court ruled on Swann in 1971, Earl Warren had retired as Chief Justice, and President Richard Nixon (who had publicly condemned forced busing) had filled Earl Warren’s seat on the Court with Warren Burger in 1969. Swann v.

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Charlotte-Mecklenberg Board of Education dealt with the constitutionality of several different techniques to achieve desegregation. In writing the unanimous decision, Burger admitted that the Court had not, as of that time, provided federal district courts with comprehensive guidelines for implementing its 1954 landmark case, Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas. He declared: Understandably, in an area of evolving remedies, those courts had to improvise and experiment without detailed or specific guidelines. This Court . . . appropriately dealt with the large constitutional principles; other federal courts had to grapple with the flinty, intractable realities of day-to-day implementation of those constitutional commands. Their efforts, of necessity, embraced a process of “trial and error,” and our effort to formulate guidelines must take into account their experience.

In accepting the Finger plan, the justices ruled that federal district courts could decree as tools of desegregation the following: reasonable bus transportation, reasonable grouping of noncontiguous zones, the reasonable movement toward the elimination of one-race schools, and the use of mathematical ratios of black and white people in the schools as a starting point toward racial desegregation. Thus, the nation’s highest tribunal had ruled that school districts could transport students in an effort to implement different techniques for the purpose of desegregating their schools. Brian L. Fife Further Reading Barrows, Frank. “School Busing: Charlotte, N.C.” The Atlantic 230, no. 5 (1972): 17-22. Assesses the school desegregation plan’s impact on the citizens of Mecklenberg County during its implementation. Fiss, Owen. “The Charlotte-Mecklenberg Case—Its Significance for Northern School Desegregation.” University of Chicago Law Review 38 (1971): 697-709. Argues that the Swann ruling was not relegated to southern school systems, and that districts in the North would be affected as well.

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Gaillard, Frye. The Dream Long Deferred. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1988. Gaillard, a reporter for the Charlotte Observer, documents the desegregation process in the Charlotte-Mecklenberg school district. Goldstein, Robert D. “A Swann Song for Remedies: Equitable Relief in the Burger Court.” Harvard Civil Rights-Civil Liberties Law Review 13 (1978): 1-80. Surveys three principles that the Supreme Court has applied in its review of injunctions against state officers. Schwartz, Bernard. Swann’s Way: The School Busing Case and the Supreme Court. New York: Oxford University Press, 1986. In interviewing members of the Supreme Court and other principal personages, Schwartz provides an inside account of the Court’s decision making in Swann. See also Brown v. Board of Education; Little Rock school desegregation crisis; University of Mississippi desegregation

Sweatt v. Painter The Case: U.S. Supreme Court ruling on professional school desegregation Date: June 5, 1950 This unanimous Supreme Court decision declared that the “separate but equal” standard established in Plessy v. Ferguson in 1896 was unattainable in higher education. The Supreme Court’s Plessy v. Ferguson decision (1896) established the “separate but equal” doctrine that provided the legal justification for segregation. Civil rights organizations, including the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), although opposed to “separate but equal,” decided to use the courts in an attempt to make sure that the “equal” part of the “separate but equal” doctrine was being enforced. In a series of cases running from 1936 to the Sweatt decision in 1950, the NAACP attacked the lack of law schools and graduate programs for African Americans throughout the South.

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If no professional schools existed, clearly the “separate but equal” doctrine was not being met. When African Americans started seeking admission to professional schools throughout the South, many states established “overnight” law schools and professional schools in order to comply with Plessy. These schools were certainly separate, but were they equal? Herman Sweatt, a Houston, Texas, postal worker, applied for admission to the University of Texas Law School in 1946. He was denied admission on the grounds that Texas had just created a law school for African Americans. To avoid integration, Texas had rented a few rooms in Houston and hired two black lawyers as its faculty. Sweatt refused to attend the “black law school,” saying that it was inferior and he would be deprived of the “equal protection of the law.” A unanimous Supreme Court sided with Sweatt, whose case was argued by Thurgood Marshall of the NAACP. Even if the facilities at the two Texas schools were equal, the Court concluded that inequality might exist with respect to other factors “which make for greatness in a law school.” Such factors include the reputation of the faculty and administration and the prestige of the alumni. “It is difficult to believe,” said Chief Justice Fred M. Vinson, Jr., “that one who had a free choice between these law schools would consider the question close.” The Court ordered that Sweatt be admitted to the University of Texas Law School. The Sweatt case marked the first time the Supreme Court found a black professional school to be unequal in quality. Although the Court refused to reexamine Plessy v. Ferguson, the decision in Sweatt paved the way for the NAACP to launch a direct assault in overturning Plessy in Brown v. Board of Education only four years later. Darryl Paulson See also Bakke case; Brown v. Board of Education; Civil Rights movement; Keyes v. Denver School District No. 1; National Association for the Advancement of Colored People; Plessy v. Ferguson; School desegregation; Segregation

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Talented Tenth Definition: Term coined by W. E. B. Du Bois to denote a black intellectual elite that he hoped would provide the leadership necessary to facilitate the advancement of African Americans Date: 1903 Du Bois’s idea of a Talented Tenth of black leadership reflected the changing spirit of black activism in early twentieth century America, offering a new synthesis of black protest thought that would influence the early Civil Rights movement. The first African American to receive a doctoral degree from Harvard University, W. E. B. Du Bois drew upon a tradition of northern-based black intellectualism predating the Civil War to promote the development of a classically trained vanguard of “leaders, thinkers, and artists” to educate and uplift oppressed, lower-class African Americans. Du Bois’s Talented Tenth proposal was largely a response to accommodationists such as Booker T. Washington, who emphasized vocational education as a means for African Americans to establish themselves economically and socially in a manner nonthreatening to whites. Originally a follower of Washington, Du Bois began to dissent from accommodationist policy when Washington’s emphasis on industrial education and his influence with northern philanthropists drew resources away from southern liberal arts colleges such as Atlanta University, where Du Bois was a professor of sociology. Although Du Bois’s scathing criticisms of accommodationism echoed those of other “radical” black leaders such as William Monroe Trotter, who denounced Washington as a race traitor, Du Bois’s call for a Talented Tenth was essentially an elitist variation of the doctrine of self-help and racial solidarity that was at the core of accommodationism. Like Washington, Du Bois advocated education as a means of strengthening black communities by alleviating social pathologies brought on by generations of oppression and cultural alienation. While recognizing the necessity of vocational training for young African Americans, Du Bois insisted that the true aim of education was “not to make men carpenters (but) to make car-

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penters men” by imbuing them with a sense of culture and an elevated awareness of their place in the world. To accomplish this, Du Bois argued, it would be necessary to maintain a small number of quality liberal-arts institutions for African Americans dedicated to developing and motivating liberally educated black teachers and professionals. Impact The idea of a Talented Tenth of black leadership is significant not only as the essence of Du Bois’s racial policy but also as a reflection of the changing spirit of black activism in early twentieth century America. By combining elements of accommodationism with strains of postbellum agitation, Du Bois advanced a new synthesis of black protest thought that exerted considerable influence upon the early Civil Rights movement; at the heart of this synthesis was his advocacy of leadership by the Talented Tenth. The Niagara Movement, organized by Du Bois in 1905, consisted mainly of upper- and middle-class black intellectuals from northern states and emphasized agitation as a means of protest. In 1909, key members of the Niagara Movement, including Du

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Bois, joined forces with progressive upper- and middle-class whites to establish the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), whose strategy of legalism and direct action relied heavily upon the leadership of attorneys and academics. Despite the success of this strategy of legalism and the prominent leadership of scholars such as Martin Luther King, Jr., enthusiasm for the idea of a Talented Tenth waned through the twentieth century as the focus of the Civil Rights movement shifted from the interests of a biracial elite to those of a predominantly black working class. Michael H. Burchett See also Atlanta Compromise; Black cabinet; Black colleges and universities; Civil Rights movement; Education; National Association for the Advancement of Colored People; Niagara Movement

Terry v. Adams The Case: U.S. Supreme Court ruling on white primaries Date: May 4, 1953 In this case, the Supreme Court clearly declared the white primary unconstitutional. Beginning in 1889, the Jaybird Democratic Association in Texas started the practice of holding a primary election to select candidates for the Democratic Party in order to circumvent the Fifteenth Amendment. These candidates, often uncontested, usually were elected to office. Although white voters could participate in this process, black voters were excluded. The Supreme Court, by a vote of eight to one, declared the white primaries unconstitutional. Justice Hugo L. Black announced the decision for the 8-1 majority in this case, but there was no majority opinion. Instead, there were a series of opinions issued by various justices. Black emphasized that the government could not exclude African Americans from primaries, which were the only significant elections in most southern jurisdictions. Justice Felix Frankfurter criticized

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the complicity of southern election officials in excluding African Americans from the process. Justice Tom C. Clark focused on the fact that the white primary was an adjunct of the state-regulated Democratic Party. In general, eight justices believed that in some way, the white primary was a public institution in violation of the Fifteenth Amendment. Only Justice Sherman Minton dissented, finding that the white primary acted simply as an interest group. Richard L. Wilson See also Fifteenth Amendment; Gerrymandering; Voting Rights Act of 1965; White primaries

Thirteenth Amendment The Law: Amendment to the U.S. Constitution that abolished the institution of slavery in the United States Date: Ratified on December 18, 1865 After decades of slave revolts, abolitionist struggles, and a bloody Civil War that was fought, in part, to end slavery, the Thirteenth Amendment brought a definitive end to the institution. The antislavery and abolition movements did not begin with the Civil War. As early as 1652, the state of Rhode Island passed antislavery legislation. In 1773, Benjamin Franklin and Dr. Benjamin Rush formed the first abolition society in America. In 1832, the New England Anti-Slavery Society was formed by newspaper editor William Lloyd Garrison, who also helped found the American Anti-Slavery Society in 1833. The Society of Friends, or Quakers, a religious group who settled early in the history of the United States, were very active in the antislavery movement. Their religion forbade the holding of slaves. Quakers primarily settled in the northern part of the country. Antislavery Legislation In 1807, federal legislation was passed outlawing the importation of slaves after January 1, 1808. However, this did not end the use of slaves in the United States. The writers of the Constitution

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could not resolve the issue of slavery in America, and so had declared that the slave trade could end by 1808 or anytime later. Eventually, the inability of national leaders to resolve this issue would divide the nation. The Missouri Compromise of 1820 banned slavery in most of the western states and territories. This was overturned by the Supreme Court in 1857, in the infamous Dred Scott decision. The split between the states was well in place at this point. Congress, in an attempt to appease pro- and antislavery proponents, adopted five provisions in the Compromise of 1850. The most notable was the Second Fugitive Slave Law, passed in 1851, which provided for slaves who escaped from the South and were found in northern antislavery states to be returned to slave owners. A great deal of violence erupted over this legislation, which led to the act’s repeal on June 28, 1864. This split between the North and the South eventually resulted in the Civil War. The abolitionist movement had fought throughout the history of the United States for an end to the institution of slavery. Robert

Contemporary illustration of African Americans celebrating the abolition of slavery in the District of Columbia in early 1866. (Library of Congress)

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Dale Owen, an abolitionist and legislator, struggled for the emancipation of slaves and is thought to have influenced President Abraham Lincoln with his tract The Policy of Emancipation (1862). Another radical opponent of slavery was Wendell Phillips, a noted speaker and a graduate of Harvard Law School. He believed that the U.S. Constitution supported slavery and therefore was owed no allegiance by abolitionists. Harriet Tubman was active in the Underground Railroad, which was successful in bringing many slaves into northern states that would not return them to their owners. John Brown adopted more violent means of expressing his abolitionist sentiment. He raided the federal arsenal at Harpers Ferry, Virginia, and encouraged a slave revolt. He was eventually hanged for his fanaticism. Frederick Douglass was an important abolitionist who played a significant role in the passage toward freedom for the slaves. A runaway slave, he spoke eloquently about the need to redress the wrongs created by slavery. As Civil War broke out, the movement placed greater pressure on President Lincoln to issue the Emancipation Proclamation. Lincoln had focused a great deal of attention on the issue of slavery during the famous Lincoln-Douglas debates. The Emancipation Proclamation was issued on September 22, 1862, well after the beginning of the Civil War. It announced that in states that had seceded from the union, all slaves would be freed effective January 1, 1863. This proclamation did not free many slaves. It did not apply to states that were part of the Union and was unenforceable in those states involved in the Confederacy. The major function of the Emancipation Proclamation was to announce to all that the Civil War was about slavery. At the time that the Civil War began, the African American population of the United States consisted of approximately four and a half million people, four million of whom were slaves. White supremacy was the general ideology of both Southerners and Northerners. Slaves were denied such rights as the right to legal marriage, choice of residence, and education, and existed in perpetual servitude. Without significant changes in institutional structures, there was no hope of freedom.

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The Thirteenth Amendment Section 1. Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction. Section 2. Congress shall have power to enforce this article by appropriate legislation.

The Civil War Amendments The Thirteenth Amendment was one of three amendments known as the Civil War amendments. The combined purpose of these three amendments was to free the slaves and promote their participation in their country. The Thirteenth Amendment states “neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.” One of the battles surrounding the Thirteenth Amendment in particular, and all the Civil War amendments in general, concerned the interpretation of the Tenth Amendment. The Tenth Amendment stated that no federal legislation could detract from the power of state government. Those who opposed the Thirteenth Amendment claimed that the right to allow slavery was not specifically denied in the Constitution and therefore fell within the authority of the state. With the passage of the Thirteenth Amendment, the long fight to abolish slavery was over. The amendment was ratified on December 6, 1865, and officially announced on December 18, 1865. For some abolitionists, such as William Lloyd Garrison, the battle had been won: Slavery was ended. Others saw the Thirteenth Amendment as only a beginning. Frederick Douglass did not have the same high hopes held by Garrison. Douglass believed that slavery would not be abolished until the former slaves acquired the right to vote. The passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1866 did not provide this right. It was not until the passage of the Fourteenth Amendment, in 1868, that citizenship and the rights thereof were guaranteed to “all persons

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born or naturalized in the United States.” Finally, in 1870, former slaves were expressly given the right to vote. Within weeks, the first African American in the U.S. Senate, Hiram R. Revels, took his seat. Emancipation in the Reconstruction Era On April 15, 1865, President Lincoln died from wounds inflicted by an assassin the night before. Vice President Andrew Johnson took over the reins of the presidency and reconstruction of the nation. Johnson, however, was not highly supportive or sympathetic to the needs of the slaves. Johnson blocked every attempt to extend rights to former slaves. In fact, Johnson vetoed most of the bills that were passed by Congress, only to have his veto overridden by a two-thirds majority of Congress. Impeachment charges eventually ensued, and Johnson was spared by only a one-vote margin. At that point, Johnson withdrew from Reconstruction activities and allowed Congress to control the process.

African Americans marching through Richmond, Virginia, to commemorate Emancipation Day, around the turn of the twentieth century. (Library of Congress)

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One interesting note is the relationship between the woman suffrage movement and the abolition and black suffrage process. The decision over whether to support the call for the black vote divided the woman suffrage movement. Some believed that a gradual transition, in which first black men received the vote and then all women received the vote, would meet with greater success. Two such women were Lucy Stone and Julia Ward Howe. Others believed that suffrage was “all or nothing,” and that women should not forsake their own cause in order to gain the vote for others. Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton were opposed to amendments that specifically referred to men and neglected suffrage for women. It was not until the passage of the Nineteenth Amendment in 1920 that women gained the longsought suffrage. Sharon L. Larson Further Reading Commission on the Bicentennial of the U.S. Constitution. 1791 to 1991: The Bill of Rights and Beyond. Washington, D.C.: Author, 1991. Discusses the history of the Constitution and each of the amendments. The abolitionist movement and passage of the Civil War amendments are discussed in relation to each other. Franklin, John Hope. From Slavery to Freedom: A History of Negro Americans. 3d ed. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1967. Details the changes undergone by African Americans during the movement toward abolition and after they achieved citizenship. Furnas, J. C. The Road to Harpers Ferry. London: Faber & Faber, 1961. An enlightening discussion of the problems created or observed in the abolitionist movement. McKissack, Pat, and Fredrick McKissack. The Civil Rights Movement in America from 1865 to the Present. 2d ed. Chicago: Children’s Press, 1991. Examines the progression of rights granted since the Civil War. Owen, Robert Dale. The Wrong of Slavery, the Right of Emancipation, and the Future of the African Race in the United States. Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott, 1864. Writings on the issue of slavery in the United States from an abolitionist of the slave era.

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Richards, David A. J. Conscience and the Constitution: History, Theory, and Law of the Reconstruction Amendments. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1993. Tsesis, Alexander. The Thirteenth Amendment and American Freedom: A Legal History. New York: New York University Press, 2004. An examination of the amendment and its tremendous impact. See also Abolition; Black codes; Civil Rights Act of 1866; Civil Rights Acts of 1866-1875; Civil Rights cases; Civil War; Compromise of 1850; Disfranchisement laws in Mississippi; Emancipation Proclamation; Fifteenth Amendment; Fourteenth Amendment; Freedmen’s Bureau; Fugitive Slave Law of 1850; Race riots of 1866; Reconstruction; Restrictive covenants; Scott v. Sandford; Underground Railroad

Thomas-Hill hearings The Event: Confirmation hearings of Supreme Court nominee Clarence Thomas, in which Anita Hill made charges of sexual harassment against Thomas Date: October, 1991 The hearings sparked intense national debate over issues of racism, sexism, and political gamesmanship. The public humiliation suffered by both Clarence Hill and Anita Thomas opened debate on the nature and fairness of the Senate confirmation process. After the resignation of Supreme Court associate justice Thurgood Marshall, the first African American to serve on the Court, President George Bush sought to fill the vacancy with another African American. Marshall, however, had been a leading advocate of the Civil Rights movement and the last staunchly liberal Supreme Court justice from the Earl Warren court era. Bush’s nominee, Clarence Thomas, was his predecessor’s political and philosophical opposite. A Yale graduate, Thomas possessed a distinguished resume, including the chairmanship of the Equal Employment Opportu-

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nity Commission (EEOC) and service as a judge on the federal court of appeals. He was also one of a number of black intellectuals who challenged the merits of affirmative action. Critics charged that his tenure at the EEOC had been marked by a reluctance to pursue civil rights complaints, and his judicial record demonstrated his willingness to throw out many of the liberal decisions of the earlier Supreme Court. These were political concerns, however, in a political climate that favored Thomas’s views, and no charge of unethical conduct stood up under investigation. Anita Hill had served under Thomas at the EEOC and had maintained an amicable relationship with her former boss. During the judiciary committee’s confirmation investigation, Hill confided that Thomas had pressured her for dates and made crude, sexually charged remarks to her while he was her boss. This information was leaked to the media after the judiciary committee had voted to send the nomination to the full Senate. A second hearing was convened to examine the charges. On October 11, the first day of the second round of hearings, Thomas angrily denied the charges, and he was treated with deference by the committee. Hill, however, was barraged with accusations and insinuations by senators and witnesses. Senator Joseph Biden seemed unable to prevent the degeneration of the televised proceedings into a quasi-judicial brawl. Thomas’s characterization of the second hearing as a “hightech lynching” provoked the greatest reaction from the African American community, outraging many African Americans with the implication that African Americans themselves and their liberal white allies were figuratively lynching an “uppity” black because of his conservativism. The viciousness of the attacks on Hill, for feminists, seemed to illustrate perfectly the very reason most victims of sexual harassment do not bring charges against their harassers. Thomas, though confirmed, began his service on the Supreme Court tainted by Hill’s accusation. Judiciary hearings operate without standards of evidence or the rules that govern court proceedings. Biden’s committee could not determine the truth of the matter but could merely vote based on their impression of

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Thomas’s character and the political desirability of seating him on the Court. Janet Alice Long Further Reading Brock, David. The Real Anita Hill. New York: Free Press, 1993. Thomas, Clarence. Confronting the Future: Selections from the Senate Confirmation Hearings and Prior Speeches. Introduction by L. Gordon Crovitz. Washington, D.C.: Regnery Gateway, 1992. See also Marshall’s appointment to the Supreme Court; Politics and government

Three-fifths compromise The Event: Agreement reached in the convention that drafted the U.S. Constitution on the apportionment of congressional representation to slaveholding states Date: 1787 Place: Philadelphia, Pennsylvania Northern delegates to the Constitutional Convention did not want nonvoting slave populations to be counted when congressional representation was apportioned, while southern delegates wanted slaves to be counted equally with nonslaves. The disagreement was resolved in the three-fifths compromise. The Constitutional Convention in 1787 adopted the three-fifths compromise, whereby five slaves were counted as three people for purposes of taxation and representation. The idea originated as part of a 1783 congressional plan to base taxation on population. Congress rejected the three-fifths idea, but delegate James Wilson of Pennsylvania resurrected it as an amendment to the Virginia plan at the Constitutional Convention. The Wilson amendment provoked heated debate over the counting of slaves. Most northern delegates regarded slaves as property and not deserving representation, while southern delegates insisted that African Americans be counted equally with

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whites for purposes of representation. Northern delegates wanted slaves counted for taxation, while southern delegates disagreed. Delegates also debated whether the Congress or a census every ten years should determine the apportionment of representatives in the national legislature. Several northern delegates wanted Congress to control apportionment because the West was developing rapidly. They considered the three-fifths idea pro-South and opposed its adoption. Southern delegates, meanwhile, threatened to reject the three-fifths idea if Congress controlled representation. Northern delegates eventually agreed to accept a census every ten years and count slaves as people rather than property, demonstrating the numerical strength of the proslavery interests. Until the Civil War, therefore, slaves were counted as three-fifths of nonslaves for purposes of taxation and representation. David L. Porter See also Politics and government; Slavery

Till lynching The Event: Murder of an African American youth who merely whistled at a white woman Date: August 28, 1955 Place: Money, Mississippi Emmett Till’s widely publicized murder helped make Americans more aware of the depth of racism that still existed in the United States. An African American youth, Emmett Till was born in Chicago in 1941. Shortly after he turned fourteen, his mother sent him to visit relatives in the small town of Money, Mississippi. On the afternoon of August 24, 1955, Till and a group of other teenagers went to a grocery store to buy candy and soft drinks. Till reportedly whistled at Carolyn Bryant, the wife of Roy Bryant, the store’s white owner. Early in the morning of August 28, Roy Bryant and his brother, J. W. Milam, kidnapped Till from his great uncle’s home. The men

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beat him and shot him in the head and dumped his body in the Tallahatchie River. Till’s mutilated and badly decomposed body was found three days later by a fisherman. Bryant and Milam were tried for Till’s kidnapping and murder. After deliberating for only one hour, the all-white jury acquitted them. Later, Milam sold his story to Look magazine; in the article, he confessed to the killing. Neither Bryant nor Milam was ever convicted for Till’s murder. Till’s remains were shipped to Chicago, where his mother insisted on an open-casket funeral. An estimated fifty thousand people came to see his body. Photographs of his corpse were also published in Jet magazine, and the murder was covered by magazines and newspapers all over the world. The murder case, and the subsequent lack of justice, is considered a major catalyst to the Civil Rights movement. In May, 2004, the U.S. Justice Department announced that it was reopening its investigation into Till’s murder. The two men tried for Till’s murder decades earlier had been acquitted of all charges and had since died. However, evidence remained implicating other, still living, men in Till’s lynching. The fiveyear federal statute of limitations had long since lapsed, but anyone charged with the murder could still be tried in a state court. Phyllis B. Gerstenfeld Further Reading Metress, Christopher, ed. The Lynching of Emmett Till: A Documentary Narrative. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2002. A collection of diverse documents related to Till’s murder. Till-Mobley, Mamie, and Christopher Benson. Death of Innocence: The Story of the Hate Crime That Changed America. New York: Random House, 2003. Memoir of events related to Till’s murder, written by his mother. See also Civil Rights movement; Civil rights worker murders; Dyer antilynching bill; King assassination

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Turner’s slave insurrection The Event: Short-lived but bloody slave revolt led by Nat Turner Date: 1831 Place: Southampton County, Virginia The 1831 slave revolt led by Nat Turner sent fear through the southern white community and prompted legislation prohibiting the assembly, education, and movement of plantation slaves. Although neither the first attempted slave rebellion nor the last during the more than two centuries of African American slavery, Nat Turner’s assault against the whites in southeastern Virginia marked the only time a group of black slaves banded together to strike successfully against their white masters. Nat Turner So far as is known, Turner spent his entire life as a slave in his native Southampton County, where he had been born on October 2, 1800, on the plantation of Benjamin Turner. His mother was probably a native African, who taught him at an early age to believe that he possessed supernatural powers. He was both a mystic and oriented toward religion. In addition to possessing those traits, he could read, and historians have surmised that he learned this skill from the Turner family. Nat became a Christian through the instruction of his grandmother, Bridget, and mostly read the Bible. Perhaps because of his knowledge of the Bible, he became a Baptist preacher. Because of his mysticism, his ability to read, and his activities as a minister, Turner gained considerable influence over his fellow slaves. Samuel Turner, Benjamin’s son, inherited Nat during times of economic depression in Virginia. A newly hired overseer drove the slaves to work harder, and as a consequence, Nat ran away. Although Nat eluded capture for thirty days, he turned himself in to his owner. His return went unpunished, but in the days that followed, Nat saw that his own freedom could not be realized without his people’s freedom. Nat married a slave named Cherry in the early 1820’s, and they had three children. Cherry would later conceal coded maps

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and lists that Turner used in his revolt, which experts have never been able to decode. When Samuel Turner died in 1822, Nat’s family was broken up and sold to different families. Nat went to a neighboring farm owner, Thomas Moore. He was sold again to Joseph Travis in 1831. Nat Turner thought of himself as an instrument of God. Between 1825 and 1830, Turner gained respect as a traveling neighborhood preacher. He became deeply religious, fasting and praying in solitude. In his own mind he had been ordained—like the prophets of old—to perform a special mission. He professed that God communicated with him through voices and signs in the heavens. On May 12, 1828, Turner heard a “great noise” and saw “white spirits” and “black spirits” battling. The Revolt In February, 1831, a certain blueness in the atmosphere—a solar eclipse—persuaded him that God was announcing that the

Contemporary drawing of Nat Turner’s capture. (Library of Congress)

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time had come for the slaves to attack their white masters. Turner communicated this message to his band of followers; the rebellion ensued on August 21, when Turner and seven fellow slaves murdered the Travis family. Within twenty-four hours after the rebellion began, the band of rebels numbered seventy-five slaves. In the next two days, an additional fifty-one whites were killed. No evidence exists to indicate that Turner’s movement was a part of any larger scheme. One slave, Nat Turner, used the power at his command to attempt to break his shackles and those of his followers. Turner directed his attack toward the county seat, Jerusalem, and the weapons in its armory; he never made it. The white community responded promptly, and with an overpowering force of armed owners and militia, it routed the poorly armed slaves during the second day of the rebellion. Although he eluded capture for six weeks, Turner and all the rebels were either killed or captured and executed. Hundreds of other nonparticipating and innocent slaves were slain as a result of fright in the white community. Turner’s court-appointed attorney, Thomas Gray, recorded Turner’s “confessions” on November 1, and on November 11, 1831, Turner was hanged. Gray later remarked on Turner’s intelligence and knowledge of military tactics. Aftermath Although Turner’s revolt took place in a relatively isolated section of Virginia, the uprising caused the entire South to tremble. Many white southerners called for more stringent laws regulating slaves’ behavior, such as making it a crime to teach a slave to read or write. Turner’s revolt coincided with the blossoming of the abolition movement in the North, for the rebellion occurred in the same year that William Lloyd Garrison began his unremitting assault on the South’s “peculiar institution.” Although no one has been able to demonstrate that abolitionist activity had any influence at all on Turner, white southerners were horrified at the seeming coincidence. They described abolitionists as persons who wanted not only to end slavery but also to sponsor a massacre of southern whites. The white South stood as one against any outside interference with its system.

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Although white people throughout the South looked anew at slavery, in no place did they look more closely than in Virginia. During the legislative session of 1831-1832, there occurred the most thorough public discussion of slavery in southern history prior to 1861. Only four months after Turner’s revolt, the legislature appointed a committee to recommend to the state a course of action in dealing with slavery. Those Virginians opposed to slavery made their case. They argued that slavery was a prime cause of Virginia’s economic backwardness; that it injured white manners and morals; and that, as witnessed by Turner’s revolt, it was basically dangerous. While they did talk about abolition as benefiting the slaves, they primarily maintained that white Virginians would reap the greatest rewards, for the African Americans, after a gradual and possibly compensated emancipation, would be removed from the state. These abolitionists, most of whom were from western Virginia (modern West Virginia), an area of few slaves, could not agree on a specific plan to accomplish their purpose. Slavery’s defenders countered by boasting of Virginia’s economic well-being and the good treatment and contentment of the slaves. Referring to the well-established belief in the sanctity of private property, they denied that the legislature had any right to meddle with slave property. The Virginia legislature decided not to tamper with slavery. It rebuffed those who wanted to put Virginia on the road to emancipation. After these debates, white southerners no longer seriously considered any alternative to slavery. In the aftermath of Turner’s revolt and Virginia’s debate, the South erected a massive defense of its peculiar institution. That defense permeated southern politics, religion, literature, and science. Nat Turner’s revolt—the only successful slave uprising in the South—heralded and confirmed the total southern commitment to black slavery. However, Turner left a profound legacy: Slaves would fight for their freedom. Turner’s rebellion has inspired black activists since, including Marcus Garvey and Malcolm X. William J. Cooper, Jr. Updated by Marilyn Elizabeth Perry

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Further Reading Terry Bisson’s Nat Turner (Los Angeles: Melrose Square, 1988) is an easy-to-read account of Nat Turner’s life and motivations. Thomas R. Gray’s The Confessions of Nat Turner: The Leader of the Late Insurrection in Southampton, Va. (1831; reprint, Miami: Mnemosyne, 1969) contains Turner’s own account of his revolt, as given to an official of the court that tried him. William Styron’s Confessions of Nat Turner (New York: Random House, 1967) is a controversial novel that aimed to show an understanding of Turner’s revolt and the institution of slavery but was sharply attacked by African American intellectuals. Henry Irving Tragle’s The Southampton Slave Revolt of 1831: A Compilation of Source Material (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1971) reprints primary source material: newspaper accounts, trial records, and other documents written at the time of the revolt. See also Abolition; Amistad slave revolt; Harpers Ferry raid; Liberator, The; New York City slave revolt; Proslavery argument; Stono Rebellion

Tuskegee Airmen Identification: African American aviators who served in World War II Date: 1942-1946 African Americans have made important contributions to the military services in every war in which they have fought, but the achievements of the Tuskegee Airmen during World War II brought them previously unparalleled distinctions. African Americans made noteworthy gains in the military services during World War II, particularly in the U.S. Army Air Forces. Despite opposition from southern legislators, African American recruits began training at Tuskegee, Alabama. Challenged by substandard training conditions, discrimination, and segregation, the Tuskegee Airmen responded with resolve and discipline. Between 1942 and 1946, 996 African Americans received their silver wings at Tuskegee Army Air Field. Some 450 of

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Future general Benjamin O. Davis, Jr., preparing for a training flight in early 1942. (National Archives)

these pilots flew with the 99th Fighter Squadron and later, the 332d Fighter Group. They became known as the “red tails” for the scarlet coloring on the tail and nose of their P-51B Mustang aircraft. After their baptism of fire in North Africa, the Tuskegee Airmen moved into Italy. Their commanding officer was Colonel Benjamin O. Davis, Jr. Particularly notable is a daring strafing mission that Davis led in Austria. Despite intense group fire, Davis and his squadron destroyed or damaged thirty-five locomotives, six of which are credited to Davis himself. Around that same time, another pilot in the 332d destroyed a German destroyer single-handedly with machine guns. The Tuskegee Airmen were also the first U.S. pilots to down a German jet. The 332d achieved lasting fame when it assumed escort duties for U.S. bombers striking deep into Germany. The 332d established a record for never losing a single bomber in approximately two hundred missions, a truly extraordinary accomplishment. The group’s heroics in the air and dignity on the ground won them many medals and broke the color barriers of the U.S. military. By the end of World War II, one out of sixteen aviators in the U.S. Army Air Forces was an African American. Douglas W. Richmond

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Further Reading Dryden, Charles W. A-train: Memoirs of a Tuskegee Airman. Foreword by Benjamin O. Davis, Jr. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1997. Francis, Charles E. The Tuskegee Airmen: The Men Who Changed a Nation. 4th rev. ed. Boston: Branden, 2002. Homan, Lynn M., and Thomas Reilly. Black Knights: The Story of the Tuskegee Airmen. Foreword by Louis R. Purnell. Gretna, La.: Pelican, 2001. See also Buffalo soldiers; Military; World War II

Tuskegee experiment The Event: Long-term syphilis study conducted by the U.S. Public Health Service on four hundred African American men Date: 1932-1972 Place: Tuskegee, Alabama During the Tuskegee experiment, scientists charted the course of the disease in men who had contracted the disease before their participation in the study. None of the men received any treatment, and at least 254 men died from the disease or its complications. Moreover, the men were told that they were receiving medical treatment, and none of them knew that they were being observed as part of an experiment on the effects of syphilis. It has been argued that the Tuskegee experiment was motivated by the assumption that African Americans were more susceptible than whites to syphilis, and therefore the Public Health Service was interested in studying whether this was the case and, if so, why. One critic of the study, Martin Levine, went so far as to argue that the origins of the experiment lay in a stereotypical view of black sexuality: It was widely believed [among whites] that black racial inferiority made them a notoriously syphilis-soaked race! Their smaller brains lacked mechanisms for controlling sexual desire, causing

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them to be highly promiscuous. They matured earlier and consequently were sexually active; and the black man’s enormous penis, with its long foreskin, was prone to venereal infections. These physiological differences meant the disease must affect the races differently. . . .

Other critics of this medical study point to it as evidence of the federal government’s complicity in institutionalized racism against African Americans. Comments such as those by John Heller, the director of the Department of Venereal Diseases at the Public Health Service from 1943 to 1948, are often cited as evidence of this racism. Heller, for example, is quoted as saying of the men in the Tuskegee study that their “status did not warrant ethical debate. They were subjects, not patients: clinical material, not sick people.” For many African Americans, the Tuskegee study has come to represent verifiable evidence that institutionalized racism still exists in the United States. The study is also often cited to support possibly less verifiable claims of such racism. In the early 1990’s, the Tuskegee study was often cited as supporting evidence for the AIDS conspiracy theory, which posited that the U.S. government manufactured the AIDS virus and intentionally infected people in Africa through immunization programs in order to commit genocide. During the mid-1990’s, a rumor spread through the African American community reporting that the company that made Snapple, a popular brand of bottled beverages, was owned by the Ku Klux Klan. On April 19, 1996, ABC’s news magazine, 20/20, aired a segment, narrated by journalist John Stossel, that investigated this claim. Stossel interviewed a number of people from various African American communities, many of whom believed this and other rumors, such as the U.S. government’s manufacturing of the AIDS virus, and cited the Tuskegee experiment as evidence that such institutional racism has existed in the past in the United States and still existed. Susan Mackey-Kallis See also Brownsville incident; Stereotypes

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Twenty-fourth Amendment The Law: Amendment to the U.S. Constitution that outlawed poll taxes Date: Ratified on January 23, 1964 The poll tax was an arbitrary limitation on voting rights, particularly in the South, where it was often employed to deny the franchise to African Americans and poor whites. On January 23, 1964, the South Dakota senate cast the deciding vote in the ratification process of the Twenty-fourth Amendment to the United States Constitution. The amendment ended the poll tax as a condition of voting in federal elections. The real function of the tax had been to deny civil rights to members of racial minorities, especially black southerners. The Twenty-fourth Amendment, passage of which began in 1962, was only one part of a larger campaign of civil rights reform that came to a head with the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Poll Taxes Civil rights issues were central to the social questions that surfaced during the 1950’s and 1960’s. Beginning with the Brown v. Board of Education case in 1954, which disallowed school segregation, both courts and legislatures were engaged in the resolution of such issues. John F. Kennedy assumed office as president in 1961, at a time when the Civil Rights movement was taking on a direct-action character—undertaking mass demonstrations, civil disobedience, and occasional acts of violence—and opposition to it was being manifested in mass arrests, intimidation, and even murder. This trend convinced the new administration and its liberal supporters in Congress that the time had come to use federal legislation as well as the courts to initiate civil rights reform. The first target was the poll tax. The poll tax, a uniform, direct, and personal tax levied upon individuals, was not a new phenomenon. It had existed in some states since the early twentieth century and in others, such as New Hampshire, since colonial times, though not as a franchise prerequisite. All states with the poll tax allowed exceptions to it:

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officers and men on active militia duty, veterans, and persons with disabilities resulting from gainful occupation and whose taxable property did not exceed $500, for example. The tax was nominal in most cases for those who did have to pay, being only $1.50 or $2.00 per year. The tax was cumulative, however, so that voters who came to register after having not paid the tax for a number of years might find themselves having to pay what for many poor people would be a considerable sum. To civil rights advocates, the poll tax paralleled literacy tests as a device to limit voting rights, and they were determined that both should be abolished. Even in southern states where the poll tax was no longer used, literacy tests, closed registration lists, and straightforward intimidation were used to prevent African Americans from voting. The Process of Reform The process of reform had to begin somewhere, and northern Democrats, acting upon inspiration from the Kennedy administration, began with the anti-poll tax amendment process early in 1962. There was strong opposition from a southern bloc of conservatives, mostly Democrats led by Richard B. Russell, a Democrat from Georgia, but it was not as strong as might have been expected. The Senate majority leader was Michael H. Mansfield, a Democrat from Montana, and it was his responsibility to shepherd the legislation through the Senate. The anti-poll tax amendment itself was sponsored by Spessard L. Holland, a Democrat from Florida, whose role might have appeared surprising, since he was part of the southern bloc. Holland, however, was no friend of the poll tax in any form and had led a successful campaign to abolish it in his own state in 1937. The Senate Judiciary Committee, chaired by Senator James O. Eastland, a Democrat from Mississippi and part of the southern bloc, had conducted hearings on the poll tax and literacy tests for weeks to little avail. On March 14, Senator Mansfield moved for Senate consideration of a bill to establish Alexander Hamilton’s New York home as a national monument, to which, it was suggested, the proposed constitutional amendment could be at-

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tached. The Senate Judiciary Committee, wherein, according to liberal senators, civil rights issues tended to get lost, was effectively bypassed, and the Hamilton motion, with the expectation of its being linked to the anti-poll tax amendment, was put before the Senate. As soon as the motion appeared on the floor, the southern conservative bloc began a “friendly” filibuster, so termed because the southerners did not go all-out to prevent the Hamilton resolution from coming to a vote. It is conceivable that the vote was considered a foregone conclusion, and the filibuster was merely for form’s sake. In any event, it endured for ten days, until, apparently, the participants had run out of words. Then Senator Holland introduced the preordained motion to substitute the language of the anti-poll tax amendment for the language of the Hamilton resolution. This brought Senator Russell to his feet in protest: “We are adopting an absurd, farfetched, irrational, unreasonable, and unconstitutional method to get this amendment,” he charged. Others agreed, including Jacob K. Javits, a Republican from New York, who proposed that the Senate should act against the poll tax by simple legislation, and Paul H. Douglas, a Democrat from Illinois, who warned that, the questionable manner of the adoption notwithstanding, using the amendment process could itself prove the downfall of efforts to abolish the tax. Nevertheless, the Holland motion was put to a vote, and on March 27 it passed the Senate by a margin of seventy-seven to sixteen. An amendment to the Constitution of the United States repealing the poll tax for all federal elections was then forwarded to the House of Representatives, where it was debated, dissected, promoted, and opposed in similar manner, until it passed that chamber in August, 1962. It was then up to the states to ratify the amendment by vote of their legislatures. The Amendment Goes to the States It was speculated widely during succeeding months that, on the premise that the poll-tax amendment would pass the states and greatly broaden the base of the southern electorate, the Democratic leadership would work to break the power of the southern

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bloc by promoting candidates who were more loyal to the national party to oppose the bloc’s members in the primaries. At least thirteen congressional seats were thought to be on a target list. Needless to say, Republican Party leaders were delighted, convinced by the southerners’ defiant attitude that the Democrats had outsmarted themselves. Meanwhile, the poll-tax amendment was being considered by the states, and it was an uphill battle. The Arizona house, for example, approved the amendment in 1963, but it died in the state senate. By the end of the year, however, momentum toward ratification gathered, and by January 5, 1964, the amendment needed to be approved by only two more states. A few days later the number dropped to one, and on January 23 South Dakota’s senate voted thirty-four to zero in favor of ratification. The Twentyfourth Amendment to the Constitution was law, requiring then only the further technicality of formal certification by the General Services Administration of the federal government. South Dakota was compelled to race through its vote in order to beat out Georgia as the deciding state. There was an irony in this, as Georgia was the home of Senator Richard Russell, the most outspoken opponent of the amendment in the early days of debate on the motion. Impact The poll-tax amendment symbolized the liberal determination to institute civil rights reform. There was, however, opposition of nearly equal intensity. Three political proposals made in 1963 were meant to redress—or so their advocates claimed—the eroding of states’ rights by the federal government. In fact, this package aimed at countering the possible effects of impending civil rights legislation, including abolition of the poll tax. The first proposal sought to give the power to redraw congressional districts to state governments. Gerrymandering could then keep power out of the hands of members of racial minorities, even if minorities came to the polls in greater numbers after the Twenty-fourth Amendment was passed. The second proposal placed the constitutional amendment process in the hands of the state legislatures, bypassing either

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Congress or a national convention. Under this plan, a two-thirds majority of the state legislatures could propose an amendment, and a three-fourths majority could make it part of the Constitution. The third proposal sought to create a “Court of the Union” that would review Supreme Court decisions on federal-state relations and would be made up of the chief justices of the fifty states. This court would have effectively nullified the Supreme Court as the final arbiter of constitutionality in matters touching upon civil rights, because most such matters touched in turn on federal-state relations. None of these propositions came to fruition, but the Twentyfourth Amendment did, abolishing the poll tax in federal elections. Within two months, however, Arkansas, one of the last states to cling to the poll tax, upheld in court the state constitution’s requirement of a poll tax for state and local elections. Later, a private election oversight organization found at least seven irregularities in the primary election process in Arkansas, including the fact that unauthorized persons were permitted to help count ballots. The organization discovered that, while the poll tax was no longer required for federal elections, there were many other devices available to skew elections in the way segregationists wanted. Various avenues were taken to limit the impact of the new amendment even for federal elections. In Mississippi, state officials cracked down on minor violations of little-used aspects of the civil code as a device to intimidate members of the Congress of Racial Equality and others who were involved in voter registration drives among African Americans. Violence was used as well when African Americans congregated in anticipation of a protest march in Canton, Mississippi, in 1963. In Georgia, support for segregationist presidential candidate George Wallace led to black-white confrontations and violence. In Virginia, on the eve of the 1964 presidential election, a federal court upheld a state law requiring payment of the poll tax for the right to vote in local and state elections. Two years later, however, in Harper v. Virginia Board of Elections, the Supreme Court concluded that poll taxes violated the equal protection clause of the Constitution, and the last such tax was swept away.

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Abolition of the poll tax was a step in the right direction, but there was a long road still to travel before voting rights for minority groups would be secure at all levels of American politics. Robert Cole Further Reading Branch, Taylor. Parting the Waters: America in the King Years, 195463. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1988. A sweeping, authoritative, well-conceived, and well-written account of the Civil Rights movement, concentrating on Martin Luther King, Jr., and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. Not an academic treatment in the conventional sense but rather intensely personal. Kelly, Alfred H., Winifred A. Harbison, and Herman Betz. The American Constitution: Its Origins and Development. 6th ed. New York: W. W. Norton, 1983. Discusses in detail the Supreme Court cases and the contents of civil rights legislation, of which the Twenty-fourth Amendment was a part. It is particularly useful on those court cases that either struck down segregation rules or wiped away such voting restrictions as the poll tax and literacy tests. Kluger, R. Simple Justice: The History of “Brown v. Board of Education” and Black America’s Struggle for Equality. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1976. A study in depth of the first major step in the civil rights reform era, in which the principle of desegregation of American society was laid down. Thurgood Marshall, later a distinguished Supreme Court justice, played a central role in the developments examined here. Matusow, A. J. The Unraveling of America: A History of Liberalism in the 1960’s. New York: Harper & Row, 1984. This volume traces the rise and fall of American postwar liberalism, concentrating on both the successes and the failures of liberal views and policies during the era of civil rights reform. “Poll Taxes and Literacy Texts.” The Congressional Digest 41 (May, 1962): 131-137. A careful and detailed explanation of the background of the poll tax and the process and content of the Senate debate leading to passage of the Twenty-fourth Amendment. The article proceeds in a detached and factual manner

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and lists specifically the nature of poll taxes as they existed in the several states as of May, 1962. Schlesinger, Arthur M., Jr. A Thousand Days. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1965. An inside look at the Kennedy administration with observations on aspects of Kennedy’s civil rights policies, including abolition of the poll tax. Schlesinger was part of the Kennedy inner circle and an old-line Democrat. His view of the Kennedy years is not without bias; all the same, this is a masterful work and very useful. See also Civil Rights Act of 1960; Civil Rights Act of 1964; Fifteenth Amendment; Politics and government; Poll taxes; Voting Rights Act of 1965; Voting Rights Act of 1975

Underground Railroad Definition: Loose network of secret routes by which fugitive slaves made their way from slave states to freedom in the North, often as far as Canada. Because of the Underground Railroad’s inherently secretive nature, precise data on its operations do not exist, but it clearly helped to lead many thousands of slaves to freedom in the North, while keeping alive a spirit of resistance to the institution of slavery. Parts of the Underground Railroad may have been in place as early as 1786. By 1850, southern slave owners were claiming enormous losses of slave property to the Underground Railroad, although some scholars now believe that their claims of losses were exaggerated. It is impossible to know how many slaves made their way to freedom—estimates range from sixty to one hundred thousand people between 1800 and 1865. Fleeing Slavery Many slaves reached freedom without the aid of the Underground Railroad, and many, especially those in the Deep South, did not flee north but went instead to Mexico or found refuge with the Seminole, Cherokee, or other Native American tribes.

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However, the majority of fugitive slaves escaped from the border states and fled north. Usually, the most dangerous leg of their journey was reaching a station on the underground line; once there, conductors would pass them from site to site toward safety. It was almost impossible for a runaway slave to reach freedom successfully without assistance. Most slaves had little or no knowledge of geography and fled with only vague notions of where they were headed; most left with no money and few provisions and had to risk asking strangers along the way for food, shelter, and protection from pursuers. For the most part, persons helping runaways performed impulsive acts of compassion and did not consider themselves to be part of a resistance group. In parts of the country, however, the numbers of fugitives coming through were so great that predetermined escape routes, safe houses, and plans of action were organized. In time, some Underground Railroad lines were highly organized, and at least some routes existed in most of the states between the South and Canada. The two most frequent escape corridors were from Kentucky and Virginia into Ohio and from there north, and up the Eastern Seaboard through New England. Ohio especially was crisscrossed with routes of escape, as were western Pennsylvania and New York, eastern Indiana, and northwestern Illinois. The Middle Atlantic states and New England also had many wellestablished routes; lines existed west of Ohio and even, to some degree, in the South. After passage of the Fugitive Slave Law of 1850, organized aid to runaways grew, as the threats to free African Americans as well as fugitive slaves increased and more antislavery sympathizers felt the moral obligation to risk civil disobedience. Organization No one knows when or how the name Underground Railroad began, although legend has it that it was coined after a frustrated slave catcher swore that the fugitives he was pursuing had disappeared as thoroughly and suddenly as if they had found an underground road. As knowledge of the existence of escape routes

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spread, so did the railroad terminology, with words such as “conductors,” “stations,” “stationkeepers,” and “lines.” Conductors often used inventive means to transport fugitives safely from station to station. Many were hidden under goods or in secret compartments in wagons. A few, such as Henry “Box” Brown, were actually boxed and shipped by train or boat. At least once, slaves were hidden in carriages forming a fake funeral procession. There were so many routing options along some lines that tracing was difficult. Barns, thickets, attics, spare rooms, woodsheds, smokehouses, and cellars were used as stations. Fugitives often were disguised: A hoe could make a runaway look like a hired-out day laborer; fine clothes could disguise a runaway field hand as a servant of gentlefolk; cross-dressing could keep fugitives from matching descriptions on handbills. Mulattoes could sometimes pass as whites. Perhaps the most famous escape effected through disguise was that of husband and wife William and Ellen Craft, who, with Ellen disguised as a white southern gentleman and William as her valet, made it from Georgia to Philadelphia, where the Underground Railroad then transported them to safety. Once at a station, fugitives were given shel-

A novel method of escape from slavery used by a few African Americans was to have themselves shipped to the North in boxes. (Library of Congress)

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ter, food, clothing, and sometimes money, as well as help in reaching the next stop. Quakers—mostly of the Hicksite sect—played a large and early role in maintaining the Underground Railroad; in 1797, George Washington complained of Quakers helping one of his slaves escape. Other sects, such as Covenanters and Wesleyan Methodists, also contributed a number of agents. Particular locations, such as Oberlin College in Ohio, became important centers of activity. Women as well as men played active roles, especially in providing food and clothing to fugitives, and women often organized auxiliaries to support the more visible vigilance and abolitionist committees. The role played by white antislavery sympathizers, although important, has tended to be overemphasized. In southern states, fellow slaves usually were the source of food and a hiding place for escapees. In border states, free blacks provided the most important help to fugitives, both in all-black settlements and in cities where black abolitionists worked alongside their white counterparts. Many African American churches and vigilance committees extended protection, support, and help in relocation to fugitives who reached the free states. Whites rarely took the initiative to go south and effect escapes, but a number of former slaves returned to help friends and family flee. The most famous conductor to recruit escapees was the remarkable Harriet Tubman. Having herself escaped from slavery, she made some nineteen daring and successful trips into southern states to bring out groups of slaves, despite the fortythousand-dollar bounty on her head. She is credited with personally leading more than three hundred slaves to safety, never losing anyone in her charge, and earned the title “the Moses of her people.” The Busy 1850’s The period of greatest activity for the Underground Railroad was from 1850 to 1860. Among the most active white stationkeepers was Levi Coffin: In thirty-five years of activism in Indiana and Ohio, Coffin helped three thousand fugitive slaves on their way north. Quaker Thomas Garrett of Wilmington, Dela-

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ware, aided several thousand fugitives over a forty-year period; he lost all of his property to court fines as a result but refused to cease his work. Important black members of the Underground Railroad included the Reverend William H. Mitchell of Ohio, who in twelve years provided temporary shelter for thirteen hundred fleeing slaves; Robert Purvis of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania; William Whipper of Columbia, Pennsylvania; Henry Highland Garnet of New York; Lewis Hayden of Boston, Massachusetts; Frederick Douglass of Rochester, New York; and William Wells Brown of Buffalo, New York. However, most of those who hid, fed, transported, and otherwise aided fugitive slaves have remained anonymous. Likewise, records about the fugitives themselves are scarce. Following the Civil War, several prominent activists published memoirs about their Underground Railroad activities that included accounts of some of the slaves they aided. Black stationkeeper William Still of Philadelphia kept notes on almost seven hundred fugitives he helped, providing valuable statistics. His records indicate that 80 percent of runaways were male and that significant numbers of house servants as well as field hands fled. However, the names and profiles of the vast majority of the thousands of men, women, and children who braved the hazards of flight in desperate bids for freedom remain unknown. Grace McEntee Further Reading Several important contributions have been made to the literature on the Underground Railroad including Tom Calarco’s The Underground Railroad in the Adirondack Region (Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland & Co., 2004), Keith P. Griffler’s Front Line of Freedom: African Americans and the Forging of the Underground Railroad in the Ohio Valley (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2004), William J. Switala’s Underground Railroad in Pennsylvania (Mechanicsburg, Pa.: Stackpole Books, 2001), Switala’s Underground Railroad in Delaware, Maryland, and West Virginia (Mechanicsburg, Pa.: Stackpole Books, 2004), and Ann Hagedorn’s Beyond the River: The Untold Story of the Heroes of the Underground Railroad (New

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York: Simon & Schuster, 2002). Henrietta Buckmaster’s Let My People Go: The Story of the Underground Railroad and the Growth of the Abolition Movement (Boston: Beacon Press, 1941) discusses the Underground Railroad within the broader context of the growth of antislavery sentiment. Levi Coffin’s Reminiscences of Levi Coffin (New York: Arno Press, 1968) is an important primary source; this work reprints his third edition of 1898. Larry Gara’s The Liberty Line: The Legend of the Underground Railroad (Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 1961) counters popular notions that exaggerate the role of white abolitionists and underplay blacks’ contributions in helping fugitive slaves. Wilbur H. Siebert’s The Underground Railroad from Slavery to Freedom (1898; reprint, New York: Arno Press, 1968) is a landmark history of much value. William Still’s The Underground Railroad (1872; reprint, Chicago: Johnson, 1972) is a vast collection of narratives and sketches, focusing on the fugitives’ stories. See also Abolition; American Anti-Slavery Society; Antislavery laws of 1777 and 1807; Fugitive Slave Law of 1793; Fugitive Slave Law of 1850; National Council of Colored People; North Star, The; Slave codes; Slavery; Thirteenth Amendment

Understanding tests Definition: Forms of literacy tests requiring prospective voters to demonstrate their understanding of portions of documents such as the U.S. and state constitutions Understanding tests were used to practice racial discrimination in voter registration. The Supreme Court ruled on such tests several times before they were prohibited by the Voting Rights Act of 1965. In an effort to circumvent the Fifteenth Amendment, which gave the right to vote to African Americans, many southern states, beginning in the latter part of the nineteenth century, used poll taxes and literacy requirements to prevent African Americans from registering to vote. Part of the literacy requirement in some states was the passing of understanding tests, which commonly re-

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quired prospective voters to read and explain a provision of the U.S. Constitution or the state constitution. Voting registrars sometimes had discretion to choose the passage to be interpreted and judge the adequacy of the explanation given. The discretion vested in registrars provided the opportunity for widespread discrimination against African American voters. The Supreme Court confronted the issue of literacy tests several times. In Lassiter v. Northampton County Board of Elections (1959), the Court upheld the use of literacy tests on the grounds that they had some relationship to intelligent voter choices. The Court did say, however, that should a state law give election officials complete discretion to determine whether prospective voters understood the constitutional passages they were given to interpret, that law might be unconstitutional. The Court subsequently did hold such a law unconstitutional in Louisiana v. United States (1965). Because of the difficulty in determining when literacy tests were being used to perpetuate racial discrimination, Congress suspended their use in the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Daryl R. Fair See also Civil Rights movement; Fifteenth Amendment; Lassiter v. Northampton County Board of Elections; Voting Rights Act of 1965

United Negro College Fund Identification: Privately funded education assistance organization created to help African American students attain college educations Date: Established on April 25, 1944 Since its foundation, the United Negro College Fund has played a major role in assisting students and helping to support predominantly black colleges and universities, which produce more than 25 percent of all African American college graduates. Under the direction of Frederick D. Patterson, president of Tuskegee Institute, the United Negro College Fund (UNCF) was established in 1944, with twenty-seven member colleges and a

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combined enrollment of fourteen thousand students. The goal was to become one of the world’s leading education assistance organizations. With a few exceptions, most UNCF member institutions had been founded by religious societies from the North after the Civil War and before the turn of the century. Located principally in the Southeast and in eastern Texas, these institutions operate with a variety of organizational structures and program offerings. Since its inception, UNCF has grown to become the oldest and most successful African American higher-education assistance organization. In 1998, UNCF provided support for a consortium of forty-one private, accredited four-year black colleges and universities. UNCF raises operating money for its member schools so that they can maintain the highest academic standards and prepare their students for demanding professions and careers. Although these institutions constitute only about 3 percent of all colleges and universities in the United States, they graduate more than one-quarter of all African Americans who earn the baccalaureate degree and nearly 40 percent of African Americans who later earn a doctoral degree. These graduates help build a stronger nation as community leaders and educators and in numerous other vocations. Alvin K. Benson See also Ashmun Institute; Black colleges and universities; Education

United States Commission on Civil Rights Identification: Federal commission created by the Civil Rights Act of 1957 Date: Created in 1957 Place: Washington, D.C. The reports and studies of the Commission on Civil Rights have been an important factor in the passage of major civil rights legislation.

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The U.S. Commission on Civil Rights was created in 1957 by Congress as part of the Civil Rights Act of 1957. It consisted of six members, appointed by the president and approved by Congress. The original purpose of the agency was to monitor civil rights (particularly violations of voting rights in the South), issue reports, and then disband, but Congress has continuously renewed its mandate. The Commission on Civil Rights (abbreviated as CRC, for Civil Rights Commission) was created in the wake of the 1954 Supreme Court decision in Brown v. Board of Education. In this case, the Court decided that separate facilities for black and white students in public education were unconstitutional. A year later, in Brown II, the Court ruled that schools must integrate with “all deliberate speed.” No specific timetable was given, however, for fear of further alienating southern whites. The CRC helped lay the foundation for the civil rights legislation of the 1960’s. The commission’s mandate involved investigating voting rights violations, collecting and studying voting data related to denials of equal protection under the law, and appraising federal laws and policies as they related to equal protection. In addition to creating the CRC, the 1957 Civil Rights Act made the civil rights component in the Justice Department a division, and empowered the U.S. attorney general to initiate civil court proceedings to enforce voting rights. The 1957 statute gave the attorney general the power to intervene only on a case-bycase basis, which was tedious, as there were thousands of cases of voting rights violations. Civil Rights Legislation During Dwight D. Eisenhower’s administration, the Commission on Civil Rights investigated voting rights violations in eight southern states and found no fewer than a hundred counties using discriminatory measures against African Americans. The Civil Rights Act of 1960 was passed as a result of the CRC’s 1959 report. Although the CRC had recommended that Congress pass legislation authorizing federal registrars in obstructionist districts, the act provided only court-appointed referees to oversee and resolve alleged voting rights abuses. Continuing studies by the CRC would assist in more powerful legislation in 1964 and 1965.

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The 1964 Civil Rights Act was instrumental in the desegregation of public facilities in a still-segregated South. Based on ongoing concerns and studies by the CRC in education, voting, and employment, and influenced by the intensifying Civil Rights movement and the March on Washington in 1963, the 1964 act forbade racial discrimination in public facilities, voting registration procedures, and employment. The act empowered the attorney general to intervene and take civil action in cases of racial discrimination in public accommodations. It also cut federal funds to school districts that discriminated and created the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission to oversee discrimination complaints in the workplace. The 1965 Voting Rights Act is the most powerful legislation in the area of suffrage, and it eliminated virtually all remaining loopholes. The act effectively took the process of voter registration out of the hands of states and localities, providing federal machinery for this process. The legislation also forbade literacy tests in most instances. In addition, a preclearance mechanism (often called Section 5) was put in place that required political districts to submit proposed changes in elections or districts to the federal government for approval. A “clean record” provision was instituted, allowing political districts to be removed from coverage of the preclearance provision if no discrimination or voting irregularities have been found for the previous ten years. The CRC has played a vital role in the extension of the 1965 Voting Rights Act and thus in continued suffrage among African Americans in the Deep South. One of the most controversial areas of the act, the preclearance provision, was challenged by southerners. Testimony by the CRC revealed that southern states, and particularly Mississippi, were seeking to subvert the intent of the act and dilute the black vote and black political victories. Legislatures did this by racial gerrymandering of political districts, going to at-large systems of municipal elections, developing multimember districts, and consolidating black and white counties. The CRC was instrumental in the extension of Section 5 and the drafting of other provisions of the 1970 Voting Rights Act. Reports by the commission would play an important role in the 1975 and 1982 extensions of the act as well.

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Challenges and Impact A major challenge to the commission came in the early 1980’s, after it issued a 1981 statement entitled Affirmative Action in the 1980’s, which advocated quotas to ensure the hiring of members of minorities. President Ronald Reagan strongly opposed the recommendations and removed three of the CRC’s commissioners, appointing more conservative commissioners. A lawsuit ensued, and in 1983 Reagan was ordered by the courts to reinstate the commissioners he had fired. Also in 1983, the commission was reorganized by a compromise congressional act (Reagan had vowed to veto an act routinely renewing the commission) to consist of eight members chosen by the president and Congress. The commission was criticized from many quarters in the 1980’s, partly for appearing to succumb to various political pressures, and many of its leaders, including Clarence Pendleton, were controversial. In the early 1990’s, it began to resume the more active role it had played in the past. Originally intended as a watchdog agency, the Commission on Civil Rights has been essential as a bipartisan fact-finding body and a resource for both Congress and the president in developing legislation. While its early charge was in the area of voting rights, it has conducted numerous studies and provided congressional testimony in education, housing, racial segregation, employment discrimination, and denial of civil rights on the basis of race, creed, color, religion, national origin, sex, age, or disability. Mfanya D. Tryman Further Reading Among the best sources for information on the CRC are Gerald David Jaynes and Robin M. Williams, Jr., eds., A Common Destiny: Blacks and American Society (Washington, D.C.: National Academy Press, 1989); Theodore Eisenberg’s article “Civil Rights Commission,” in Civil Rights and Equality: Selections from the Encyclopedia of the American Constitution (New York: Macmillan, 1989); Frank R. Parker, Black Votes Count (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1990); Steven F. Lawson, Running for Freedom (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1991); Hugh Davis Graham, Civil Rights and the Presidency (New York: Oxford University Press,

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1992); Charles S. Bullock III and Charles M. Lamb, Implementation of Civil Rights Policy (Monterey, Calif.: Brooks/Cole, 1984); and Gertrude Ezorsky, Racism and Justice (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1991). See also Brown v. Board of Education; Civil Rights Act of 1957; Civil Rights Act of 1960; Civil Rights Act of 1964; Civil Rights Act of 1968; Civil Rights Act of 1991; Civil Rights Acts of 1866-1875; Civil Rights movement; Voting Rights Act of 1965

United States v. Classic The Case: U.S. Supreme Court ruling on white primaries Date: May 26, 1941 Overturning its 1921 decision, the Supreme Court held that Congress has the power to regulate primaries whenever state law makes them an integral part of the process for electing candidates to federal office. Two decisions of the U.S. Supreme Court, in 1921 and 1935, gave southern states the authority to exclude African Americans from voting in primary elections. These decisions were important because the South was dominated by the Democratic Party from the end of Reconstruction until the middle of the twentieth century. If African Americans could not vote in the Democratic primary, they were denied any real choice in the selection of elected officials. In 1921, the Supreme Court ruled in Newberry v. United States that Congress did not have the authority to regulate primary elections. At issue was a Michigan senatorial primary race between Henry Ford and Truman Newberry in which Newberry alleged that he was the victim of vote fraud. The Newberry case provided the opportunity for southern states to pass white primary laws, since the Court declared that such elections fell outside constitutional protection. In Grovey v. Townsend (1935), the Court ruled that state party conventions could exclude African Americans from primaries without violating the Constitution. In the battle to eliminate the white primary, the U.S. Justice Department had

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to persuade the Supreme Court to overturn the Newberry decision. United States v. Classic provided the opportunity to reverse Newberry. Although the Classic case did not involve racial discrimination or the white primary, it did involve the relationship of the primary to the election process. Vote fraud was a common feature of Louisiana elections. While investigating charges of fraud by the heirs of former governor and senator Huey Long, the Justice Department discovered that Patrick Classic, an opponent of the Long faction, had engaged in altering and falsely counting votes. Classic, invoking the Newberry decision, argued that primaries were beyond federal control. Reversing Newberry, the U.S. Supreme Court declared that the Constitution protected the right to vote in primaries as well as general elections. This was certainly true in Louisiana, the Court stated, “where the state law has made the primary an integral part of the procedure of choice, or where in fact the primary effectively controls the choice.” The reversal of Newberry by the Classic decision provided the framework for the final attack on white primaries. It was evident that in the one-party South, whoever won the Democratic primary won the general election. Only three years after the Classic decision, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) successfully challenged the white primaries in Smith v. Allwright. Without the Classic decision, the assault on the white primaries would have been delayed for years. See also Grovey v. Townsend; National Association for the Advancement of Colored People; Newberry v. United States; Smith v. Allwright; Voting Rights Act of 1965; White primaries

United States v. Cruikshank The Case: U.S. Supreme Court ruling on federal enforcement of civil rights and states’ rights Date: March 27, 1876

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Drawing on narrow interpretations of the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments, the Supreme Court severely limited the authority of the federal government to protect the civil rights of African Americans. In 1875, William Cruikshank and two other men were convicted in a federal court of participating in the lynching of two African Americans. The 1870 Reconstruction statute under which they were convicted was broadly written to make it unlawful to interfere with most rights of citizens. The constitutional authority claimed for this federal statute was the Fourteenth Amendment. Cruikshank and his codefendants, who were charged with interfering with the right and privilege “peaceably to assemble,” argued that the Fourteenth Amendment does not authorize the federal government to establish so broad a criminal statute because the amendment was written to limit state governments, not private persons. In 1876, the U.S. Supreme Court, in an opinion written by Chief Justice Morrison R. Waite, unanimously agreed with Cruikshank. The Fourteenth Amendment, which establishes citizenship and then says, “No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States,” applies in the first instance to state, not private, action. Private action such as the lynching in which Cruikshank participated may be punished by the federal government only if it can be shown that the intent was to deprive a specific constitutional right—and even then the indictment must specify the intent very narrowly. The decision effectively sanctioned the lynchings of African Americans for the next few decades. Robert Jacobs See also Civil Rights Acts of 1866-1875; Civil Rights cases; Dyer antilynching bill; Lynching

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United States v. Reese The Case: U.S. Supreme Court ruling on the right to vote and the Fifteenth Amendment Date: March 27, 1876 The Supreme Court voided part of the 1870 Enforcement Act, claiming that voting was a privilege, not a right. United States v. Reese (1876) marked the first major test of voting rights under the Fifteenth Amendment, which had been passed in 1870 and stated that the right 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.” A Kentucky voting official was indicted for refusing to let an African American, who had offered to pay his poll tax, vote in a municipal election. The U.S. Supreme Court, by an 8-1 margin, declared unconstitutional the Enforcement Act of 1870, the law on which the indictment was based. The Enforcement Act provided penalties for obstructing or hindering persons from voting in an election. In the majority decision delivered by Chief Justice Morison R. Waite, the Supreme Court ruled that the U.S. Congress had overreached its powers by seeking to punish the denial of voting rights on any grounds and could only legislate against discrimination based on race. According to the U.S. Supreme Court, the Fifteenth Amendment did not confer the right of suffrage on anyone but merely prohibited the United States from excluding a person from voting because of race, color, or previous condition of servitude. The ruling made it constitutionally possible for southern states to deny the right to vote on any grounds except race, thus allowing the use of poll taxes, literacy tests, good character tests, understanding clauses, and other devices to disfranchise African Americans. David L. Porter See also Disfranchisement laws in Mississippi; Fifteenth Amendment; Poll taxes

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United Steelworkers of America v. Weber The Case: U.S. Supreme Court ruling on affirmative action Date: June 27, 1979 In this case, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that an employer could establish voluntary programs, including quotas, to eliminate a manifest racial imbalance, even without evidence that the employer had previously discriminated. Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 made it unlawful “to discriminate against any individual because of his race, color, religion, sex, or national origin.” Based on this law, President Lyndon B. Johnson issued Executive Order 11246, which required all companies doing business with the federal government to take “affirmative action” to eliminate discrimination. Shortly thereafter, federal agencies began to use “numerical imbalance” as prima facie evidence of invidious discrimination, and they encouraged employers to use numerical goals, timetables, and sometimes quotas to advance the employment opportunities of underrepresented minorities and women. In the Equal Employment Opportunity Act of 1972, the majority of Congress rejected Senator Samuel Ervin’s amendment that would have barred all “preferential treatment,” but the law did not make clear how far employers were expected to go. Meanwhile, lower courts were endorsing strict quotas in situations where intentional discrimination was proven. Earlier Court Decisions In a 1976 case, McDonald v. Santa Fe Transportation Company, the Court ruled unanimously that Title VII forbade discrimination against whites as well as members of minorities, but this case avoided the question of whether employers might sometimes use affirmative-action programs that presented comparative disadvantages for whites. In the famous Regents of the University of California v. Bakke case (1978), the Court decided against rigid quotas in education. Many people expected the

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Court to take a similar position on questions of employment opportunity. The Kaiser Corporation aluminum and chemical plant of Gramercy, Louisiana, had never made employment decisions explicitly on the basis of race, but African Americans were not represented in the plant in proportion to their percentage in the local population, especially in the higher-paying craft positions. Because Kaiser Corporation did business with the federal government, its employment practices were examined by the Office of Federal Contracts Compliance. The agency was naturally critical of the fact that although African Americans made up 39 percent of the local workforce they occupied fewer than 2 percent of the craft positions at the Gramercy plant. Fourteen other Kaiser plants were found to have similar patterns of black employment. Because a costly legal challenge appeared likely, the Kaiser Corporation and the United Steelworkers of America jointly agreed to begin “voluntary” affirmative-action programs for the fifteen plants, including both goals and quotas. In the Kaiser plant, there was to be a special program to train craft workers, with thirteen positions the first year. Admission to the program was based on seniority, but at least half the positions were reserved for African Americans even if they had less seniority. This quota was to continue until the number of African Americans was commensurate with their percentage in the local labor force. Brian Weber, who had been active in union affairs, was a white employee who had five years of experience at the Gramercy plant. Disappointed not to receive one of the thirteen positions, he became angry when he learned that two African Americans with less seniority had been admitted to the program. After reading the Civil Rights Act, he decided to sue both the company and the union on the grounds that Title VII prohibited employment practices that favored one race over another. In 1977, a federal district court ruled in Weber’s favor, and the following year he again received a favorable judgment from the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals. At the appeals court, however, Justice John Wisdom dissented from the argument that statistical disproportion created a presumptive case of discrimination that

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merited remediation, and he referred to the fact that Congress in 1972 had not banned preferential treatment. The Supreme Court agreed to a writ of certiorari, and the Court listened to oral arguments on March 28, 1979. Justice Louis Powell, who was recovering from surgery, did not participate in the case, and Justice John Paul Stevens did not participate for unstated reasons. The Supreme Court’s Ruling On June 27, the Court announced a five-to-two decision that reversed the lower courts. The senior member of the majority, Justice William Brennan, Jr., decided to write the controversial opinion, and he was joined by Justices Harry Blackmun, Potter Stewart, Thurgood Marshall, and Byron White, with Blackmun writing a concurring opinion. Stewart’s vote was a surprise and seemed to contradict his position in similar cases. Chief Justice Warren Burger and Justice William Rehnquist both dissented and wrote strongly worded opinions. Speaking for the majority, Brennan stressed the narrowness of the decision, indicating that the Court was not ruling on all possible forms of preferential treatment. He argued that Weber’s case was based on a “literal” interpretation of Title VII, but that the “spirit” or purpose of the law had to be considered within the framework of its legislative history. Since the goal of Title VII was to promote “the integration of blacks into the mainstream of American society,” the law should not be used to prohibit reasonable means designed to achieve that end. Since section 703(j) stated that the statute was not to be interpreted “to require” preferential treatment, Brennan concluded that this wording gave an employer the freedom to institute a voluntary program. In defending the Kaiser program, Brennan presented three principles. First, the program did “not unnecessarily trammel the interests of the white employees,” because they were not discharged or barred from future advancement. Second, the plan was a “temporary measure” that would end when the specific target had been achieved. Third, the program did not aim for a permanent quota but was a limited measure “to eliminate a manifest racial imbalance.” Brennan implied that programs violating these principles would likely be declared invalid.

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Justice Blackmun’s concurring opinion accepted the majority outcome but took a less expansive approach to Title VII. Rather than emphasizing the voluntary nature of the Kaiser program, Blackmun followed Justice Wisdom’s contention that statistical imbalance was evidence of an “arguable violation” of the law, allowing employers “to make reasonable responses without fear of liability.” Finally, he noted that if the Court had “misperceived” the intent of Congress, this could be corrected easily by legislative action. In his thirty-seven page dissent, Justice Rehnquist emphasized the actual language of the 1964 law, criticizing Brennan’s method of stressing the goals at the expense of the literal words of the law. He noted that Section 703(j) was joined to Section 703(e), with the latter explicitly prohibiting any classifications that might deprive an individual of equal opportunity because of race or sex. He also quoted extensively from supporters of the law during the eighty-three-day debate in the Senate, including Senator Hubert Humphrey’s statement that Title VII “forbids discrimination against anyone on account of race.” Rehnquist charged that the majority holding was “a tour de force reminiscent not of jurists . . . but of escape artists such as Houdini.” In a more restrained dissent, Chief Justice Burger declared that the majority opinion “effectively rewrites Title VII to achieve what it regards as a desirable result.” He declared that he would be inclined to allow preferential treatment if he were a member of a legislative body, but that it was incompatible with the principle of separation of powers for the Court to rule “contrary to the explicit language of the statute.” In looking for the “spirit” of a law, he asked: “How are judges expected to ascertain the purpose of a law except through the words Congress used and the legislative history of the statute’s evolution?” Impact When the Weber decision was announced, it created much controversy. Defenders included most civil rights groups and officials of the administration of President Jimmy Carter. Some supported the ruling because of the assumption that preferential treatment and numerical remedies were necessary to counteract the “institutional racism” that was endemic in American soci-

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ety, and others believed that such policies were justified in order to compensate for the socioeconomic disadvantages of African Americans and members of other minorities. In contrast, critics of affirmative action feared that the Weber ruling would give a green light to quotas and “reverse discrimination,” with innocent whites being punished for past injustices for which they were not responsible. Jewish organizations such as B’nai B’rith were especially outspoken in their disagreement, for historically quotas had been used to place limits on opportunities for Jews. Formally, the Weber ruling was limited to voluntary programs of racial preference for private businesses that had manifest racial imbalance when compared with the local labor force. It did not draw a clear line of demarcation between permissible and impermissible forms of affirmative action. Since the majority chose to ignore the fact that Kaiser Corporation and the union were acting because of federal pressure under Executive Order 11246, the ruling did not address the constitutionality of this kind of state action, but the silence of the Court on this crucial issue appeared to give tacit approval. Informed observers generally agreed that there was unlikely to be an epidemic of voluntary affirmative action without the “prodding” of governmental agencies. During the 1980’s, the Court, although becoming more conservative, made decisions that generally were consistent with the key points of Weber. In Fullilove v. Klutznick (1980), the majority upheld a congressional public works law that stipulated that 10 percent of contracts had to be reserved for minority-owned businesses. When there was evidence that either public or private employers had demonstrated bad faith in the employment of members of minorities, the Court supported the right of lower courts to impose rigid quotas. In several cases, the Court allowed statistical evidence of racial or sexual imbalance to be used as one of the indicators of possible discrimination. When employees lost their jobs because of economic difficulties, however, the Court did not permit racial quotas to determine who was to be laid off. Despite public opposition to preferential treatment, by the early 1990’s it appeared very unlikely that Weber would be reversed. A quarter of a century after the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, African Americans and members of other minorities had

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made a number of gains in the realm of employment, although statistics made it clear that they were far from achieving parity with whites. By that time, the vast majority of Americans said that they agreed with the goal of equal opportunity, but there was no consensus on the goal of equality of outcomes. Few observers denied that African Americans continued to face negative stereotypes and discrimination, and race relations did not seem to be improving for the better. The principles of the Weber decision continued to elicit emotional debates. Thomas Tandy Lewis Further Reading Brennan, William, Harry Blackmun, Warren Burger, and William Rehnquist. “United Steelworkers of America v. Weber.” Supreme Court Reporter 99 (1982): 2721-2753. The complete text of both the majority and dissenting opinions, with a short introduction and summary of the facts of the case. The same texts are found in United States Reports and United States Supreme Court Reports, Lawyers’ Edition. Cohen, Carl. “Justice Debased: The Weber Decision.” Commentary 68 (September, 1979): 45-53. Written just after the decision, Cohen calls Brennan’s opinion an “unbelievably obtuse reading” of the law, showing callousness to ordinary working-class people. The one redeeming feature of the decision is Blackmun’s statement that Congress has ultimate power in the matter. ____________. “Why Racial Preference Is Illegal and Immoral.” Commentary 67 (June, 1979): 40-52. Giving an excellent account of the circumstances of Weber, this legal and philosophical analysis argues that individual rights should not be sacrificed for the benefit of the well-being of ethnic groups. Cohen reflects the traditional Jewish opposition to quotas. Eastland, Terry, and William J. Bennett. Counting by Race: Equality from the Founding Fathers to “Bakke” and “Weber.” New York: Basic Books, 1979. A historical summary with an emphasis on the change from the goal of individual equality of opportunity to that of “numerical parity” for groups. The authors are very critical of the majority opinion in the Weber case.

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Edwards, Harry. “Affirmative Action or Reverse Discrimination: The Head and Tail of Weber.” Creighton Law Review 13 (19791980): 713-766. A detailed and scholarly analysis that defends affirmative action but criticizes Brennan’s opinion for not concentrating more on the 1972 law. Edwards argues that remedial action is not a form of discrimination, even if innocent parties pay a price. Greenwalt, Kent. Discrimination and Reverse Discrimination. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1982. About two-thirds of this convenient little book is composed of Supreme Court opinions and other primary material, with an excellent introduction that defends racial preference. This is designed primarily as a text for college courses. Gross, Barry. Discrimination in Reverse: Is Turnabout Fair Play? New York: New York University Press, 1978. Deals with the philosophical and ethical issues of preferential treatment, with limited material on the legal questions. The book considers such a policy to be ethically wrong and contrary to the goal of equal justice. Meltzer, Bernard. “The Weber Case: The Judicial Abrogation of the Antidiscrimination Standard in Employment.” The University of Chicago Law Review 47 (Spring, 1980): 423-466. Includes a helpful history of affirmative action and a good analysis of the case. Meltzer believes that the goal of equal outcomes for groups will aggravate racial conflict and obstruct the ends of the Fourteenth Amendment. Meltzer’s views should be compared with those of Harry Edwards. Urofsky, Melvin. A Conflict of Rights: The Supreme Court and Affirmative Action. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1991. About a fifth of this excellent book deals with the history of affirmative action, and the rest is devoted to Johnson v. Transportation Agency in 1987. In contrast to most works, Urofsky’s presents a balanced and sympathetic evaluation of the opposing viewpoints on the controversial topic. See also Adarand Constructors v. Peña; Affirmative action; Bakke case; Fullilove v. Klutznick

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Universal Negro Improvement Association Identification: Short-lived national organization dedicated to advancing international black consciousness and racial pride Date: Founded in May, 1917 Place: New York, New York Founded by Jamaican immigrant Marcus Garvey, the Universal Negro Improvement Association was an important precursor to the civil rights and black nationalist movements of the 1950’s and 1960’s. In March, 1916, a young black Jamaican, Marcus Garvey, arrived in New York City. He had come to the United States in the hope of securing financial help for the Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA), which he had founded in Jamaica two years earlier. After delivering his first public speech in Harlem in May, Garvey began a long speaking tour that took him through thirtyeight states. In May, 1917, he returned to Harlem and—with the help of his secretary and future wife, Amy Ashwood—organized the first American chapter of the UNIA. Though hardly noticed at the time, this infant organization was a significant first step in the growth of black nationalism in the United States. Within a few years, the UNIA would claim millions of members and hundreds of branches throughout the United States, the Caribbean region, and Africa, and Garvey would be one of the most famous black people in the world. Marcus Garvey Garvey was born in St. Ann’s Bay, Jamaica, in 1887. He claimed to be of pure African descent. His father was a descendant of the maroons, or Jamaican slaves, who successfully revolted against their British masters in 1739. During his early years, Garvey gradually became aware that his color was considered by some in his society to be a badge of inferiority. Jamaica, unlike the United States, placed the mulatto in a higher caste as a buffer against the unlettered black masses. This reality caused a sense of racial isolation and yet pride to grow in the young black man.

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By his twentieth birthday, Garvey had started a program to change the lives of black Jamaicans. While working as a foreman in a printing shop in 1907, he joined a labor strike as a leader. The strike, quickly broken by the shop owners, caused Garvey to lose faith in reform through labor unions. In 1910, he started publishing a newspaper, Garvey’s Watchman, and helped form a political organization, the National Club. These efforts, which were not particularly fruitful, gave impetus to Garvey’s visit to Central America where he was able to observe the wretched conditions of black people in Costa Rica and Panama. Garvey’s travels as a black Ulysses finally led him to London, the center of the British Empire. There the young man met Dusé Mohamed Ali, an Egyptian scholar, who increased the young Jamaican’s knowledge and awareness of Africa. During his stay in England, Garvey also became acquainted with the plight of African Americans through reading Booker T. Washington’s Up from Slavery (1901). Washington’s autobiography raised questions in Garvey’s mind

Students at Tuskegee Institute, whose achievements drew Marcus Garvey to the United States, where he wished to study Booker T. Washington’s schemes for racial uplift. (Library of Congress)

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I asked, where is the black man’s Government? Where is his King and his Kingdom? Where is his President, his country and his ambassador, his army, his navy, his men of big affairs? I could not find them, and then I declared, I will help to make them.

Returning to Jamaica in 1914, Garvey created a self-help organization for black people to which he gave the imposing title, the Universal Negro Improvement and Conservation Association and African Communities League. This new organization, renamed the Universal Negro Improvement Association, based its philosophy on the need to unite “all people of Negro or African parentage.” The goals of the UNIA were to increase racial pride, to aid black people throughout the world, and “to establish a central nation for the race.” Garvey, elected the first president of UNIA, realized that black people would have to achieve these goals without assistance from white people. This self-help concept, similar to the philosophy (but not the practice) of Booker T. Washington, led Garvey to propose a black trade school in Kingston, Jamaica, similar to Washington’s Tuskegee Institute. The idea did not attract wide support and Garvey was temporarily frustrated. Garvey’s Arrival in the United States In 1915 Garvey decided to come to the United States in order to seek aid for his Jamaica-based organization. Although he had corresponded with Booker T. Washington, Washington had died before Garvey arrived in the United States in 1916. Garvey went directly to Harlem, which in the early twentieth century was becoming a center of black culture. The lives of African Americans were rapidly changing in the first two decades of the twentieth century. Metropolitan areas in the North were experiencing mass migrations of African Americans from the South. In New York City, for example, the black population increased from 91,709 in 1910 to 152,467 in 1920. African Americans were attracted by the promise of jobs and by the possibility of escaping the rigid system of segregation in the South. African Americans found, however, that they could not escape racism simply by moving. Northern whites also believed in the

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racial inferiority of African Americans and opposed black competitors for their jobs. The new immigrants, like their foreignborn counterparts, were crowded into the northern ghettos without proper housing or the possibility of escape. Racial violence broke out in several northern cities. The North proved not to be a utopia for African Americans. Founding of the UNIA These harsh realities aided Garvey in establishing the UNIA in New York. The population of Harlem was not attracted to the accommodationist philosophy of Booker T. Washington or the middle-class goals of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. Indeed, urban African Americans were wary of all prophets, even Garvey; but the young Jamaican was able to obtain support from the Jamaican immigrants in Harlem, who felt isolated, and he established a branch of UNIA there in 1917. At first, the organization encountered difficulties. Local politicians tried to gain control of it, and Garvey had to fight to save its autonomy. The original branch of the UNIA was dissolved, and a charter was obtained from the state of New York which prevented other groups from using the organization’s name. By 1918, under Garvey’s exciting leadership, the New York chapter of the UNIA boasted 3,500 members. By 1919, Garvey optimistically claimed two million members for his organization throughout the world and 200,000 subscribers for his weekly newspaper, The Negro World. In an effort to promote the economic welfare of African Americans under the auspices of the UNIA, Garvey established in 1919 two joint stock companies—the Black Star Line, an international commercial shipping company, and the Negro Factories Corporation, which was to “build and operate factories . . . to manufacture every marketable commodity.” Stock in these companies was sold only to black investors. The Black Star Line was to establish commerce with Africa and transport willing emigrants “back to Africa.” Although both companies were financial failures, they gave many black people a feeling of dignity. As a result of his promotional efforts in behalf of the Black Star Line, the federal govern-

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ment, prodded by rival black leaders, had Garvey indicted for fraudulent use of the mails in 1922. He was tried, found guilty, and sent to prison in 1923. Although his second wife, Amy Jacques Garvey, worked to hold the UNIA together, it declined rapidly. In 1927, Garvey was released from prison and deported as an undesirable alien. He returned to Jamaica, and then went to London and Paris and tried to resurrect the UNIA, but with little success. He died in poverty in London in 1940. Although a poor businessman, Garvey was a master propagandist and popular leader who made a major contribution toward race consciousness and pride among black people in the United States and throughout the world. In 2005, a vestige of the UNIA still remained in operation and even maintained an interactive Web site. The modern organization continues to honor Garvey’s legacy and the goals of the original organization. John C. Gardner Updated by R. Kent Rasmussen Further Reading Cronon, E. David. Black Moses: The Story of Marcus Garvey and the Universal Negro Improvement Association. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1955. This first scholarly biography of Garvey remains the best introduction to his life. Garvey, Amy Jacques. Garvey and Garveyism. 1963. Reprint. New York: Collier, 1976. Intimate memoir of Garvey written by his widow two decades after his death. Garvey, Marcus. Philosophy and Opinions of Marcus Garvey. Edited by Amy Jacques-Garvey, with new introduction by Robert A. Hill. New York: Atheneum, 1992. This classic collection of Garvey’s speeches and writings was assembled by his wife during the early 1920’s, while Garvey was fighting mail-fraud charges. Hill’s new introduction places the work in a broad historical perspective. Hill, Robert A., et al., eds. The Marcus Garvey and Universal Negro Improvement Association Papers. 9 vols. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983-1996. The most extensive collection of original documents by and about Garvey and his movement,

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this set is the best starting point for all research on the UNIA. Hill, Robert A., and Barbara Bair, eds. Marcus Garvey: Life and Lessons. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987. Collection of Garvey’s most didactic writings, including autobiographical material that he wrote in 1930. A long appendix includes biographies of figures important in his life. Lewis, Rupert, and Maureen Warner-Lewis, eds. Garvey: Africa, Europe, the Americas. Kingston, Jamaica: Institute of Social and Economic Research, University of the West Indies, 1986. Collection of original research papers on international aspects of Garveyism. See also Atlanta Compromise; Black nationalism; Great Migration; Nation of Islam; National Association for the Advancement of Colored People; Niagara Movement; Pan-Africanism; Plessy v. Ferguson

University of Mississippi desegregation The Event: Admission of the first African American student to the traditional segregated University of Mississippi Date: October, 1962 Place: Oxford, Mississippi The enrollment of the first African American student at the University of Mississippi provoked a national controversy. In January, 1961, James Meredith, a native Mississippian and an Air Force veteran attending Jackson State College, one of Mississippi’s all-black colleges, decided to transfer to the University of Mississippi, affectionately called “Ole Miss.” His application was rejected because, Ole Miss officials maintained, Jackson State was not an approved Southern Association Secondary School and because Meredith did not furnish letters of recommendation from University of Mississippi alumni. On May 31, 1961, he filed a lawsuit against the university, charging that he had been denied ad-

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mission because of his race. In its 114-year history, the University of Mississippi had never admitted an African American student. Meredith’s Legal Victory A federal district court judge dismissed Meredith’s suit, but in June, 1962, a U.S. court of appeals ruled that Meredith had been rejected from Ole Miss “solely because he was a Negro,” a ruling based on the Brown v. Board of Education school desegregation case of 1954. The court ordered the university to admit Meredith, and the ruling was upheld by Justice Hugo L. Black of the U.S. Supreme Court. On September 13, Mississippi governor Ross Barnett delivered a televised speech and stated, “No school will be integrated in Mississippi while I’m governor.” A week later, the board of trustees of Ole Miss appointed Governor Barnett as the university’s registrar, and he personally blocked Meredith from registering for courses that same day. Throughout Meredith’s court appeals, the U.S. Department of Justice had been monitoring the case. Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy, the brother of President John F. Kennedy, made more than a dozen phone calls to Governor Barnett, hoping to persuade him to allow Meredith to matriculate and thereby avoid a confrontation between the state of Mississippi and the federal government. The attorney general had provided Meredith with federal marshals to protect him as he attempted to register. On September 24, the court of appeals that initially had heard Meredith’s case again ordered the Board of Higher Education of Mississippi to allow Meredith to register. The following day, Meredith reported to the registrar’s office in the university’s Lyceum Building, but again Governor Barnett was there to block his registration. During a phone conversation with Attorney General Kennedy that same day, Barnett declared that he would never agree to allow Meredith to attend the University of Mississippi. When Kennedy reminded Barnett that he was openly defying a court order and could be subject to penalty, Barnett told Kennedy that he would rather spend the rest of his life in prison than allow Meredith to enroll. On September 26, Meredith again tried to register for courses, and for the third time, Governor Barnett turned him away. Two

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days later, the court of appeals warned Barnett that if he continued to block Meredith’s admission to Ole Miss, the governor would be found in contempt of court, arrested, and fined ten thousand dollars per day. On Saturday, September 29, Governor Barnett appeared at a university football game and proudly announced, I love Mississippi, I love her people, her customs! And I love and respect her heritage. Ask us what we say, it’s to hell with Bobby K!

That evening, President Kennedy called Governor Barnett and told him that the federal government would continue to back Meredith until Ole Miss admitted him. Under direct pressure from the president, Barnett began to reconsider. Finally, he agreed to allow Meredith to register on Sunday, September 30, when, the governor surmised, few students and news reporters would be milling around the campus. On Sunday evening, Meredith arrived at the Lyceum Building protected by three hundred marshals, armed in riot gear and equipped with tear gas. As Meredith and his escorts approached the campus, a group of twenty-five hundred students and other agitators attempted to block their passage. The crowd began to shout and throw bricks and bottles at the federal marshals, who retaliated with tear gas. Some of the protesters were armed with guns and began firing random shots. One federal marshal was seriously wounded by a bullet in the throat. Two onlookers, Paul Guihard, a French journalist, and Roy Gunter, a jukebox repairman, were shot and killed by rioters. Kennedy’s National Address On Sunday evening, while Mississippians rioted on the university campus, President Kennedy addressed the nation on television. The Meredith crisis had captured the country’s and news media’s attention, and the president attempted to show Mississippians and other U.S. citizens that his administration’s commitment to civil rights was serious and unwavering. He reminded his audience that “Americans are free . . . to disagree with the law but not to disobey it. For in a government of laws and not of men, no man, however prominent or powerful, and no mob, however

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James Meredith on his first day as a student at the University of Mississippi. (Library of Congress)

unruly or boisterous, is entitled to defy a court of law.” He told Mississippians, “The eyes of the nation and all the world are upon you and upon all of us. And the honor of your university— and state—are in the balance.” The situation at the University of Mississippi was deteriorating. The federal marshals, low on tear gas, requested additional help to control the unruly mob. President Kennedy federalized Mississippi National Guardsmen and ordered them to Oxford. At dawn on Monday morning, the first of five thousand troops began arriving at Oxford to restore order. During the evening’s rioting, more than one hundred people were injured and about two hundred were arrested, only twenty-four of whom were Ole Miss students. On Monday morning, October 1, at 8:30 a.m., Meredith again presented himself at the Lyceum Building to register. He was closely guarded by federal marshals, and National Guardsmen continued patrolling the Ole Miss campus and Oxford’s streets. Meredith, dressed impeccably in a business suit, registered for classes and began his matriculation at the University of Missis-

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sippi. “I am intent on seeing that every citizen has an opportunity of being a first-class citizen,” Meredith told a reporter the next day. “I am also intent on seeing that citizens have a right to be something if they work hard enough.” During his tenure at the University of Mississippi, Meredith was often the target of insults and threats. Federal marshals remained with him during his entire time at the university. On August 18, 1963, Meredith graduated from the university with a bachelor of arts degree in political science. After a year of study in Africa, Meredith enrolled at Columbia University of Law. In 1966, the year before he completed his law degree, Meredith was wounded by a sniper’s gunshot during a voter registration march from Tennessee to Mississippi. Meredith’s Impact As a result of his successful effort to desegregate Ole Miss, Meredith became one of the heroes of the Civil Rights movement. In his “Letter from Birmingham Jail” (1963), Martin Luther King, Jr., states that “One day the South will recognize its real heroes. They will be the James Merediths, courageously and with a majestic sense of purpose facing jeering and hostile mobs and the agonizing loneliness that characterizes the life of the pioneer.” Meredith’s victory at the University of Mississippi was a key triumph for the Civil Rights movement during the 1960’s. Within two years, the University of Alabama, the University of Georgia, and other southern colleges and universities that had prevented African Americans from enrolling were also desegregated, as the era of overt segregation in U.S. institutions of higher learning came to an end. The Meredith case also convincingly demonstrated that the federal government would use its power to end racial segregation in the South. Despite Governor Barnett’s defiance, President Kennedy and his attorney general were able to force the state of Mississippi to comply with a federal court order, signaling that the South would be unable to block the subsequent wave of federal legislation designed to void the region’s segregation laws. James Tackach

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Further Reading Russell H. Barrett’s Integration at Ole Miss (Chicago: Quadrangle Press, 1965) discusses Meredith’s attempt to integrate the University of Mississippi. James H. Meredith’s Three Years in Mississippi (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1966) is Meredith’s own story of his years at Ole Miss. Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr.’s Robert Kennedy and His Times (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1978) details Kennedy’s involvement in the Meredith case. Sanford Wexler’s The Civil Rights Movement: An Eyewitness History (New York: Facts on File, 1993) devotes a chapter to Meredith’s integration of Ole Miss. See also Black Power movement; Brown v. Board of Education; Civil Rights movement; Council of Federated Organizations; Freedom Summer; Little Rock school desegregation crisis; Montgomery bus boycott; Southern Christian Leadership Conference; Swann v. Charlotte-Mecklenberg Board of Education

Vietnam War The Event: U.S. military involvement in Vietnam’s civil war Date: 1960’s-1973 Place: Southeast Asia American involvement in the war in Vietnam yielded disparate results for African Americans who served there. On one hand, it was the first time that African Americans were fully integrated into the armed services. On the other, African American casualties were disproportionately greater than those suffered by white soldiers and were a significantly higher percentage than that of African Americans in the United States population. These discrepancies were mirrored at home in the conflicting attitudes of leaders of the Civil Rights movement and the African American population in general. African Americans have fought in all the foreign wars in which the United States has been involved. Before the Vietnam War, most served in the Army, and all had been segregated into separate units. Not until World War II were African Americans al-

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lowed to join the Marines. Even after the services were integrated by Executive Order 9981 in 1948, the officer corps remained almost entirely white, and African Americans had few opportunities for promotion. Nevertheless, some African Americans stayed in the military services and advanced in the ranks. By the 1960’s, the armed forces were among the few truly integrated institutions in American society, and many African Americans found more opportunities in the military services than in civilian life. During the Vietnam War, the draft system helped to increase the number of African Americans in military service. College students were eligible for deferments from the draft; because fewer African Americans than whites were college students, a disproportionate number of them were drafted. Sixteen percent of draftees during the war were African Americans, although African Americans represented only 12 percent of the total U.S. population. Most African American servicemen during the war served in Army and Marine combat units, often on the front lines. Some critics have charged that during the Vietnam War, African American soldiers were given the most dangerous combat assignments. Although fewer than 13 percent of the U.S. soldiers in Vietnam were African Americans, they constituted 20 percent of the Army’s fatalities between 1961 and 1966. However, these figures may be misleading, as many African American soldiers volunteered to join the elite combat units, which offered higher pay, greater chances for promotion, and greater respect of others in the military, while also being involved in some of the most dangerous missions. At the time of the Vietnam War, women could not serve in combat roles. However, African Americans joined other women as army and air force nurses, as military personnel in noncombat positions, and in such civilian jobs as teachers, aid workers, and in government offices in Vietnam. African American Leaders Speak Out African American leaders have historically generally supported service in the military. However, as awareness and anger regarding discrimination throughout the United States grew, more leaders and soldiers questioned why citizens who were de-

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nied their rights at home should be sent to fight for the rights of citizens of other countries. The more radical factions of the Civil Rights movement further argued that members of an oppressed minority in the United States should not agree to kill members of an oppressed minority in a nation such as Vietnam. In 1964, African Americans backed Lyndon B. Johnson for president overwhelmingly. Many initially refrained from criticizing his conduct of the Vietnam War because he had supported civil rights and voting rights legislation, and his Great Society program promised to lift the economically disadvantaged from poverty and other social ills. Critics noted, however, that Johnson’s war policies drained away the money that could have been used to support these programs. Radicals such as Eldridge Cleaver, Stokely Carmichael, and Malcolm X urged African Americans to refuse to serve in the Vietnam War. The moderate civil rights leader and winner of the Nobel Peace Prize, Martin Luther King, Jr., at first shied away from criticizing the Vietnam War. However, in April, 1967, he delivered his “Beyond War” speech, adding a highly respected voice to the growing criticism of the war. Another prominent African Ameri-

Draft lottery conducted during the Vietnam War. One of the most controversial aspects of the war was the public perception that the draft itself discriminated against African Americans. (Library of Congress)

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can critic was heavyweight boxing champion Muhammad Ali, who refused induction into the Army because of his religious beliefs. He was not granted conscientious objector status; instead, he was convicted of draft evasion, sentenced to prison, and stripped of his boxing title. However, his title was later restored. During the early years of the Vietnam War, racial tensions in the military were muted, but as the Civil Rights movement and antiwar protests converged to increase polarity in the United States, divisions in the armed services mirrored societal chasms. At the start of American involvement in the war, many of the African Americans in the military had been career soldiers who had had little contact with the Civil Rights movement at home. As the war lengthened, more young African American soldiers arrived from the ghettos and housing projects of the cities in which civil rights protests were growing. African American soldiers began to band together, studying black history and culture, using special signs and handshakes, and calling themselves blood brothers, or “bloods.” Distinguished African American Servicemen The Army’s 173rd Airborne Brigade, paratroopers known as the “Sky Soldiers,” comprised mainly African Americans, and was considered by many to be one of the best units in Vietnam for its bravery in ferocious battles. Milton Olive and Lawrence Joel, both Sky Soldiers, were two of the twenty African Americans who received the U.S. Medal of Honor, the highest U.S. military award for bravery in battle. Colin Powell, who served two tours in Vietnam with the infantry, went on to become a general, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and U.S. secretary of state. Irene Struthers Rush Further Reading Appy, Christian. Patriots: Vietnam War Remembered from All Sides. New York: Penguin Books, 2003. David, Jay, and Elaine Crane, eds. The Black Soldier from the American Revolution to Vietnam. New York: William Morrow, 1971. Nalty, Bernard C. Strength for the Fight: A History of Black Americans in the Military. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1989.

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Terry, Wallace. Bloods: An Oral History of the Vietnam War by Black Veterans. New York: Random House, 1984. See also Civil Rights movement; Civil War; Military; Military desegregation; World War II

Voting Rights Act of 1965 The Law: Federal law expanding the government’s authority to increase black voter registration and participation in states in which African Americans had been subjected to discrimination Date: Signed into law on August 16, 1965 Passage of this law was a major step in the enfranchisement of African Americans. In 1966, the U.S. Supreme Court upheld the provisions of the act, justifying the extension of federal power by noting the existence of exceptional conditions. The act had a major impact on African American participation in the political process in the South. At the turn of the twentieth century, southern states adopted numerous devices designed to disfranchise African Americans and poor whites. The most common device was the literacy test, which required prospective voters to read, write, and interpret any part of the U.S. Constitution or state constitution. The inclusion of an interpretation requirement meant that registrars could reject literate African Americans by deeming their interpretations incorrect. Other devices included the white primary, which excluded African Americans from voting in the Democratic Party primary, and poll taxes, which excluded many poor people, both black and white. Because of these devices, only about 3 percent of African Americans were registered to vote in the South in 1940. By 1956 the percentage had increased to 25 percent of the black voting-age population. In contrast, 60 percent of the white voting-age population was registered. Efforts by African Americans to register intensified during the Civil Rights movement, and by November, 1964, approximately 43 percent of voting-age African Americans

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Promotion of universal suffrage has been a principle of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People since its inception in the early twentieth century. (Library of Congress)

in the South were registered. This registration, however, was uneven. In the Deep South, especially in the rural areas, black registration was significantly lower. For example, the average black registration rate in Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana, and South Carolina was approximately 22 percent while in Mississippi the figure was less than 7 percent. The Struggle for Voting Rights Efforts to increase the registration of African Americans in the southern states involved a variety of organizations, including the Voter Education Project of the Southern Regional Council, the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC). The most important campaign occurred in Selma, Alabama, in 1965. In the fall of 1964 only 335 out of more than 15,000 African Americans of voting age were registered in Dallas County, Alabama. In Dallas County, registration was allowed only two days a month. Applicants had to fill in more than fifty blanks on a form, write a part of the Constitution

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from dictation, read four parts of the Constitution and answer four questions about what they had read, answer four questions on the working of government, and swear loyalty to both the state of Alabama and the United States. Following several months of demonstrations and efforts, civil rights activists held a march from Selma to Montgomery, Alabama. State troopers and sheriff’s posse men attacked marchers when they attempted to cross the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, and approximately one hundred marchers were injured. National outrage over the attacks led to approval of the Voting Rights Act in August, 1965, by a vote of 328 to 74 in the House of Representatives and by a 79-18 vote in the Senate. On August 6, 1965, President Lyndon B. Johnson signed the bill into law, referring to it as “one of the most monumental laws in the entire history of American freedom.” Provisions Upon the request of President Johnson, Attorney General Nicholas Katzenbach designed an exceptionally strong act. Its purpose was to enforce section 2 of the Fifteenth Amendment, which forbade states or political subdivisions from applying a voter prerequisite to deny or abridge on account of race or color the right of any citizen of the United States to vote. The previous Civil Rights Acts passed in 1957, 1960, and 1964 contained provisions designed to end voter discrimination; however, their impact was limited because they required a case-by-case approach in seeking remedies. In addition, these acts did not allow the federal government to intervene on behalf of those subject to discrimination. The 1965 Voting Rights Act included several provisions designed to overcome the shortcomings of the previous acts. First, section 4 of the act included a formula that targeted areas where discrimination was greatest and where federal government intervention in voter registration could be of the most help. The targeted areas were those that required a literacy test or similar test for registration prior to November 1, 1964, and where fewer than 50 percent of the eligible voters were either registered to vote or had actually voted in the 1964 presidential election. This pro-

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vision affected the entire states of Alabama, Alaska, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, South Carolina, and Virginia as well as twenty-six counties in North Carolina and one county in Arizona. In these areas, the Voting Rights Act eliminated for five years the use of literacy tests and other such devices as a prerequisite for registration. On August 7, 1965, Attorney General Katzenbach suspended the tests in these places. Later, in 1965 and 1966, additional counties in North Carolina and Arizona as well as one county each in Hawaii and Idaho were also targeted. Section 5 of the act included a preclearance provision that required state and local governments covered by the triggering formula to submit any proposed changes in voting laws or practices that had not been in force on November 1, 1964, to the Justice Department or the federal district court in Washington, D.C. This was designed to prevent these governments from developing new techniques designed to limit African American participation in voting. Under provisions in sections 6 and 7 of the act, the attorney general could send federal voter examiners in to gather names of eligible voters and present them to local officials, who were required to register them. Under section 8 of the law, the attorney general could also send observers or poll watchers to oversee elections to ensure that African Americans were permitted to vote and their votes were counted. During the first ten years of the act, examiners were sent to approximately sixty counties in the South, most of which were in Mississippi or Alabama. An estimated 15 percent of the African Americans who registered in this period were registered by these examiners. The federal government also assigned more than 6,500 poll watchers during the same period. Section 3 gave the courts the authority to send federal registrars and poll watchers to locales outside covered jurisdictions if the attorney general or private parties brought suits. Section 10 instructed the attorney general to challenge the constitutionality of the poll tax as a prerequisite for voting in state and local elections. Section 11 prohibited anyone “acting under color of law” from preventing qualified voters from voting or intimidating, threatening, or coercing voters; it also prohibited voting fraud in

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federal elections. Section 12 stipulated punishment for violation of someone’s voting rights. Finally, section 14 provided a detailed definition of voting. Legal Challenges to the Act South Carolina sued to test the legality of the Voting Rights Act of 1965. In South Carolina v. Katzenbach (1966), the Supreme Court unanimously upheld the major provisions of the law. In its decision, the Court recognized that the act represented an uncommon extension of federal power; however, it justified these powers by noting that exceptional conditions could justify legislative measures that might otherwise be deemed inappropriate. Other court cases followed concerning provisions of the act. In Harper v. Virginia Board of Elections (1966), the Court declared the poll tax for state and local elections unconstitutional. This overturned the Court’s 1937 decision in Breedlove v. Suttles, which stated that a poll tax did not violate the Constitution. Although African American voter registration increased significantly, some southern locales used a variety of more subtle techniques to limit the impact of black voters. These techniques included withholding information from black voters, failing to provide assistance to illiterate voters, purging voting rolls, disqualifying voters on technical grounds, requiring separate registration for different types of elections, moving polling places, and failing to provide adequate voting facilities in black precincts. Efforts were also made to dilute the impact of African American voters, which resulted in more court cases. In Allen v. Board of Elections (1969), the Court examined the issue of dilution of black voters in Mississippi when the state moved from single-member districts to at-large elections. The Court held that the Voting Rights Act gave a broad interpretation to the right to vote and stated that voting included all actions necessary to make a vote effective. This greatly increased the importance of section 5 of the Voting Rights Act and resulted in many more challenges to proposed changes in election procedures in covered jurisdictions. For example, between 1965 and 1969 the Justice Department objected to only six proposed changes. By the end of 1989, 2,335 changes had been objected to under section 5.

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In White v. Regester (1973), the Court unanimously agreed that multimember districts in the Texas counties of Bexar and Dallas were unconstitutional based on the totality of the circumstances, which included the cultural and economic realities of African Americans and Mexicans as well as the multimember districts. In general, this decision resulted in multimember districts being replaced by single-member districts. In 1980, however, in Mobile v. Bolden, the Court held that the Fifteenth Amendment applied only to access to the ballot, not vote dilution, and that the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments required a showing of purpose to discriminate. This decision was a setback for voting rights. However, in 1986 the Court gave explicit guidelines for dilution in Thornburg v. Gingles. In this North Carolina case, the Court provided a three-part test for determining if multimember districts resulted in dilution: The minority group had to be sufficiently large and geographically compact to constitute a majority in at least one single-member district; the minority group had to tend to vote as a bloc; and the majority group had to vote sufficiently as a bloc to enable it to normally defeat the minority’s preferred candidate. Impact Overall, despite manipulation and court challenges, the Voting Rights Act had a significant impact on the South. Within one month of its passage, more than 27,000 new African American voters were registered by federal examiners in Alabama, Louisiana, and Mississippi alone. By 1968 black registration in the South increased from 2 million to 3.3 million. In the seven states originally covered by the act, African American registration increased from 29.3 percent in March, 1965, to 56.6 percent by 1972. By 1988 black registration in the eleven states of the South stood at 63.7 percent; in the five Deep South states, it was 65.2 percent. Increased registration made African Americans important actors in the political process in many parts of the South and resulted in a significant rise in the number of black elected officials. In 1968 there were only 248 black elected officials in the South, but this number rose to 2,601 in 1982 and to 4,924 in 1993.

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The Voting Rights Act was renewed in 1970, 1975, and 1982. Each time it was expanded, and it is now applicable to the entire United States. Some of the major additions to the act included extending the franchise to eighteen-year-olds, adding bilingual provisions that required voting information and ballots to be printed not only in English but also in other languages appropriate for local citizens, and creating a provision for minority access and influence districts. Therefore, the Voting Rights Act not only increased the federal government’s role in voting but also resulted in significant increases in participation in the political process. William V. Moore Further Reading Davidson, Chandler, ed. Minority Vote Dilution. Washington, D.C.: Howard University Press, 1984. Elliott, Ward E. The Rise of Guardian Democracy: The Supreme Court’s Role in Voting Rights Disputes, 1845-1969. Cambridge, Mass.: Howard University Press, 1974. Garrow, David J. Protest at Selma: Martin Luther King, Jr., and the Voting Rights Act of 1965. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1978. Grofman, Bernard, and Chandler Davidson, eds. Controversies in Minority Voting: The Voting Rights Act in Perspective. Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institution, 1992. Kotz, Nick. Judgment Days: Lyndon Baines Johnson, Martin Luther King, Jr., and the Laws That Changed America. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2005. See also Civil Rights Act of 1960; Civil Rights Act of 1964; Civil Rights movement; Fifteenth Amendment; Gerrymandering; Gomillion v. Lightfoot; Grandfather clauses; Harper v. Virginia Board of Elections; Katzenbach v. McClung; Mobile v. Bolden; Newberry v. United States; Nixon v. Condon; Politics and government; Poll taxes; Shaw v. Reno; Smith v. Allwright; Terry v. Adams; Twentyfourth Amendment; Understanding tests; Voting Rights Act of 1975; White primaries; Williams v. Mississippi; Yarbrough, Ex parte

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Voting Rights Act of 1975 The Law: Federal law abolishing the use of literacy tests for voters Date: Signed into law on August 6, 1975 By eliminating discriminatory and often arbitrarily applied literacy tests, the Voting Rights Act of 1975 expanded voting rights to large numbers of poorly educated citizens and members of language minorities throughout the United States. Civil rights became a central concern of American politics in the 1960’s. Strong civil rights acts were passed during that decade, and none was more important for the extension of voting rights in particular than the Voting Rights Act of 1965. The 1975 extension of this act included a ban on literacy tests for members of language minorities. Many consider these acts to be the most important extensions of suffrage rights ever granted by Congress. In American history, the only actions that surpass the 1965 and 1975 voting rights acts in importance for extending voting rights are the Fifteenth (1870) and Nineteenth (1920) amendments to the U.S. Constitution, respectively prohibiting denial of voting rights on the basis of race, color, or previous servitude and granting the vote to women. By the mid-1960’s, the number of demonstrations by civil rights groups had grown considerably. Violence surrounding even the “peaceful” demonstrations had intensified their impact. President Lyndon B. Johnson had hoped that the states would address voting rights problems within their own borders. The federal government attempted to assist states by removing some of the obstacles to voting rights. One clear example was President Johnson’s leadership in securing the passage of the Twentyfourth Amendment in 1964, outlawing the use of poll taxes as a necessary prerequisite to voting in federal elections. This was a major step in encouraging members of minorities to exercise their voting rights. The Need for New Legislation Although the Twenty-fourth Amendment was a major elec-

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toral breakthrough, it had the same shortcoming as the civil rights acts Congress approved in 1957, 1960, and 1964: It left the federal government in a passive role in the crucial area of voter registration. The voting rights acts of 1965, 1970, and 1975 overcame this critical shortcoming. The history of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 is also the history of the Voting Rights Act of 1975, since the later action was an extension of the earlier act. The 1965 act largely was forced on President Johnson and others who hoped that the federal government could avoid direct intervention in what historically had been a local prerogative. Public opinion grew intolerant and impatient after a series of bloody demonstrations. By most accounts, the decisive event that led to congressional action in 1965 was the Freedom March from Selma to Montgomery, Alabama. The Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr., organized this march to protest the registration process in Dallas County. Like other marches during this period, it drew marchers from the entire nation. What distinguished this particular march was the violence that erupted when Governor George Wallace called out state troopers to stop the march. The clash between marchers and troopers resulted in the death of two marchers and severe injuries to scores of others. This conflict produced an outburst of demonstrations and protest across the nation. The cries for an end to this violence forced President Johnson to introduce a comprehensive voting rights bill to the U.S. Congress. The final version of this bill, which Johnson signed into law on August 6, 1965, ended literacy tests in the states of Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, South Carolina, and Virginia and in thirty-nine counties in North Carolina. The other key provision of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 was the authorization of federal examiners to conduct registration and federal observers to oversee elections. The states and counties within the affected jurisdictions also had to submit any changes in their election laws and procedures to federal examiners for clearance. The literacy provision affected southern states primarily, but the broader jurisdiction of the act affected states in every region of the nation.

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The 1970 Act The voting rights act was due for renewal in 1970. In June of that year, Congress extended the act and made some significant changes. The major changes in the 1970 amendments were a ban on literacy tests in all states, prohibition of long-term residency requirements for voting in presidential elections, and establishment of eighteen as the legal age for voting in national elections. Like the 1965 act, this legislation had a five-year life. The 1970 act created two distinct legal categories, general and special. The general provisions dealt with literacy tests, voting age, residency requirements, and penalties for interfering with voting rights. The general provisions were permanent laws which were applied nationally. The special provisions, like those in the 1965 act, were selectively applied to areas where such provisions were deemed necessary. States or counties were subjected to the special provisions if they had any test or device established as a prerequisite to either registration or voting and had less than half of the registered voters participate in the presidential elections of 1964 or 1968. The courts could also apply the special provisions to other electoral districts if the attorney general successfully brought suit against them for violating the Fifteenth Amendment. Areas subjected to the special provisions were placed under additional federal controls. There was a provision for the suspension of literacy and other test devices beyond the ban. Federal examiners were assigned to these areas to conduct registration drives, and federal observers were sent into these areas to monitor elections. In addition, similar to the 1965 act, these areas had to submit any changes in voting laws or procedures to the federal government for clearance. The special provisions could be lifted from a state or county if it successfully filed suit in a three-judge federal district court in Washington, D.C. Such suits had to convince the court that the voter tests or devices in use were not discriminatory. Renewing the 1970 Act As with the 1965 act, the 1970 amendments required reconsideration and renewal after five years. In preparation for this re-

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newal, the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights prepared an extensive report for the president and Congress in January of 1975. The report, The Voting Rights Act: Ten Years After, set the tone for the congressional debate that was to follow. In general, the report found that minority participation in the electoral process had increased significantly since 1965. Discriminatory practices, however, were still hampering minority registration and voting. The report suggested a number of changes, the most controversial of which were its recommendation of a ten-year extension of the act and its call for greater attention to members of language minorities, or those who did not speak English. In February, the House Judiciary Subcommittee on Civil and Constitutional Rights began hearings on extending the Voting Rights Act. Although many different bills were introduced in both the House and the Senate, the one that worked its way successfully through both chambers was H.R. 6219. After swift movement through the committee system, this bill passed the House of Representatives on June 4 by a 341-70 vote. Efforts to stall this bill when it was sent to the Senate proved unsuccessful. Senator James O. Eastland, chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee and a strong opponent of the bill, put off action until mid-July. The tactics used by Senator Eastland proved unsuccessful when the Senate leadership under Mike Mansfield, managed to bring the House bill directly to the Senate floor. When it appeared that the bill’s opponents would stall it on the Senate floor, Majority leader Mansfield and Majority whip Robert Byrd skillfully passed two cloture motions (limiting debate) to get the bill passed. After considerable parliamentary maneuvering, the Senate leadership managed to get seventeen proposed amendments rejected or tabled. The one area where the bill’s opponents succeeded was an amendment that limited the extension to seven years instead of ten. Once this issue was settled, the Senate passed the bill by a vote of 77-12. The House quickly made some expedient rules changes which allowed it to accept the Senate version of the bill without going to a conference committee. The House then voted 346 to 56 to accept the Senate version and sent the bill to President Gerald Ford.

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President Ford signed the voting rights extension (PL 9473) on August 6, 1975. Impact The passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1975 extended the rights secured by the initial 1965 act through August 6, 1982. This portion of the act, Title I, added little to the previous legislation. The most significant changes were the result of Titles II and III of the 1975 act. Title II of the new act expanded the basic protection of the old legislation to members of certain language minorities: persons of Spanish heritage, American Indians, Asian Americans, and Alaskan natives. Federal observers could be sent into areas if more than 5 percent of the voting-age population was identified by the Census Bureau as a single language minority, election material for the 1972 presidential election was printed in English only, or less than half of the voting-age citizens had voted in the 1974 presidential election. As with the earlier acts, areas could be removed from Title II jurisdiction by appealing their case successfully to the federal district court in Washington, D.C. They had to prove that their election laws had posed no barrier to voting over the past ten years. The provisions in Title III of this act required certain jurisdictions, those with at least 5 percent non-English-speaking populations, to conduct bilingual elections. The interesting twist to this provision was that areas could drop the bilingual elections if they could prove that the illiteracy rate among their language minority had dropped below the national illiteracy rate. States and their subdivisions could free themselves from these federal regulations by improving the educational opportunities for members of their language minorities. The primary accomplishment of this legislation was that it gave access to the electoral process to a significant number of members of language minorities. It also expanded voting rights enforcement to numerous jurisdictions outside the South. The Justice Department identified 513 political jurisdictions in thirty states that provided bilingual elections in 1976. All of these bilingual elections were a direct result of the Voting Rights Act of 1975.

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The number of electoral districts required to seek clearance for changes in their election laws increased by 279 after this enactment. Many people believe the 1975 Voting Rights Act to be the most significant expansion of suffrage rights outside the South since the passage of the Nineteenth Amendment. It was clearly the most significant ever for members of language minorities. Donald V. Weatherman Further Reading “Controversy over Extension of the Federal Voting Rights Act.” Congressional Digest 54 (June/July, 1975): 163-192. One of the best summaries of the arguments both for and against the voting rights extension. It contains edited versions of speeches presented in Congress as well as position papers presented by interest groups on both sides of the issue. Lawson, Steven. Black Ballots: Voting Rights in the South, 19441969. New York: Columbia University Press, 1976. A valuable resource on the development of the black suffrage movement. Especially useful for people interested in the obstacles that confronted reform-minded individuals during the two decades that preceded the major legislative breakthroughs of the mid-1960’s. Contains a complete list of references and a thorough index. Matthews, Donald, and James W. Prothro. Negroes and the New Southern Politics. New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1966. A good general resource with an especially helpful bibliography. Chapter 10 has an especially illustrative discussion of some of the frustrations that grew out of the Civil Rights movement after significant legislative successes. Stanley, Harold W. Voter Mobilization and the Politics of Race: The South and Universal Suffrage, 1952-1984. New York: Praeger, 1987. A good general resource on the impact of suffrage reform in the South. Its main shortcoming is that it does not cover the impact of this legislation outside that region. Shows the complexity of this topic within the South. U.S. Commission on Civil Rights. The Voting Rights Act: Ten Years After. Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office,

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1975. One of the best resources on this topic. Readily available at any library with government documents. A fine brief history of the impact of the voting rights acts of 1965 and 1970, combined with recommendations for extension in 1975. This report was the focal point of the debate in Congress in 1975. See also Gerrymandering; Politics and government; Twentyfourth Amendment; Voting Rights Act of 1965

Washington v. Davis The Case: U.S. Supreme Court ruling on employment discrimination Date: June 7, 1976 The Supreme Court ruled that plaintiffs must show a discriminatory intent, not merely a disparate impact, to prevail under the equal protection requirements of the Fifth and Fourteenth Amendments. In 1970 African American plaintiffs challenged the constitutionality of a hiring and promotion policy of the District of Columbia police department. They objected to the use of Test 21, which attempted to measure verbal skills and reading ability, because African American applicants failed the test at a rate four times that of white applicants. They were encouraged by Griggs v. Duke Power Company (1971), when the Supreme Court interpreted Title VII so that employers had to demonstrate the business necessity of any employment policies having a disparate impact on members of racial minorities. The plaintiffs in the Washington case had to rely on the Fifth Amendment because at the time they filed suit Title VII did not apply to governmental agencies. By a 7-2 vote, the Court upheld the use of the examination. Justice Byron R. White’s opinion for the majority emphasized that an employment practice is not unconstitutional “solely because it has a racially disproportionate impact.” Citing numerous precedents, White concluded that the Court had employed the “purposeful discrimination” test when examining claims of a constitutional violation.

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Addressing the questions of when and how one might infer discriminatory intent, White wrote that disproportionate impact was “not irrelevant,” but that it had to be considered within the context of the totality of relevant facts. The Constitution did not require scientific proof that requirements were related to job performance, but employers had to show that there was a reasonable relationship between the two. White found that Test 21 was neutral on its face and rationally related to the legitimate governmental purpose of improving the communication skills of police officers. The Washington decision did not disturb the Court’s earlier rulings in regard to Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, prohibiting many employment requirements that had a disproportionate effect on members of minorities. It also actually had little influence in regard to the racial effects of employment requirements because Title VII was expanded to include governmental employees in 1972. The decision was important, however, for nonemployment cases such as McCleskey v. Kemp (1987), in which the Court disregarded statistical studies when examining the constitutionality of capital punishment. Thomas Tandy Lewis See also Griggs v. Duke Power Company; McCleskey v. Kemp

Washington, D.C., riots The Event: Racial unrest that erupted in the nation’s capital Date: November 22, 1962; August 1-3, 1967 Place: Washington, D.C. The events were short-lived but had a profound impact on the country as a whole during the Civil Rights movement. Although much of the attention during the Civil Rights movement in the 1960’s focused on the South, racial tension also existed in the North, especially in urban areas such as Washington, D.C. The 1962 riot broke out at a football game between two longtime rival high schools, one white and the other African Ameri-

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can, and spilled over into the streets. In 1967, other seemingly minor incidents set off a riot. On November 22, 1962, two high school football rivals met for a fifth consecutive annual Washington, D.C., championship game. These schools were St. John’s, a mostly white Catholic high school, and Eastern, a mainly African American public school. During the game, a player ejected for roughness returned to the field and began fighting. His own teammates subdued him, but his actions began a chain reaction. The fighting spread quickly from the field into the crowd, the parking lots, and surrounding streets. A total of thirty-four people were injured before the police brought it under control. In 1967, a citywide riot occurred. Earlier that summer, many civil rights leaders, including Martin Luther King, Jr., had warned of possible disorders in several cities including Washington, D.C., but their warnings were largely ignored. Although some accused these leaders of giving people reasons to riot, Federal Bureau of Investigation director J. Edgar Hoover acknowledged there was no direct evidence supporting this belief. The violence broke out on August 1. The riot started with sporadic fires set mainly in African American neighborhoods. This was followed by rioters throwing rocks and bottles at police officers and firefighters responding to the blaze. In one area, two roaming gangs shot at police. The turmoil subsided on August 3. After the 1967 racial unrest in Washington and other cities, President Lyndon B. Johnson appointed Illinois governor Otto Kerner head of the National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders, known as the Kerner Commission, to study the reasons for the riots and growing racial tension in the nation. The commission eventually concluded that the United States was being divided into two societies, one white and the other black. The commission concluded that the urban areas of the nation faced a downward trend unless action was taken to relieve discriminatory conditions. This gave rise to a new attitude that brought about new government legislation. Robert Sullivan

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Further Reading See Richard and Beatrice K. Hofstadter’s Great Issues in American History (1982) for extensive materials on racial problems of the 1960’s and the attempted solutions. The Kerner Commission Report published in 1968 also contains important information. See also Chicago riots; Chisholm’s election to Congress; New York riots; Newark riot; Watts riot

Watts riot The Event: Racially motivated civil disturbances that reached such a level of violence that National Guard troops were employed to regain control Date: August, 1965 Place: Los Angeles, California The outbreak of racial violence on August 11, 1965, shattered the summer calm of Los Angeles, California, and eroded the elation felt by many people when President Lyndon B. Johnson had signed the 1965 Voting Rights Act into law only five days earlier. Official investigations confirmed that the causes of the upheaval were deeply rooted in the conditions of ghetto life in the sprawling metropolis. In less immediate terms, however, the upsurge of anarchistic energy stemmed from the existence of intolerable tensions in relations between whites and blacks within U.S. society. The Watts area of Los Angeles in 1965 provided a perfect setting for racial conflict. The neighborhood had long been the center of African American life in the city. As a result, Watts offered its inhabitants full exposure to the hazards of ghetto existence. More than 30 percent of the workforce was unemployed. Approximately 14 percent of the population was functionally illiterate. The black residents of Watts faced serious barriers in their pursuit of better housing, more remunerative jobs, and improved education. Separated from white society, Watts was a storehouse of combustible material on the southeast side of Los Angeles.

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Beginnings A minor clash between police and African American residents caused the explosion that ripped through Watts. Along the edge of the ghetto, on the night of August 11, a California Highway Patrol officer arrested two young African Americans for reckless driving. While the officer administered a sobriety test, a hostile crowd gathered. The confrontation led to more arrests. Finally, the police departed amid a hail of rocks thrown by irate African Americans. Rumors of police brutality spread through Watts. In the hours before midnight, a full-scale riot developed. Automobiles traveling through the ghetto were pelted with rocks and bottles. Police moved back into the area at 11:00 p.m., but flurries of violence continued throughout the night. After a day filled with tension, the rioters returned to the streets on the night of August 12. Commercial buildings were set ablaze, and firemen who responded to the alarms were greeted with rocks and gunfire. California state officials received reports that estimated the number of rioters at eight thousand. The police were unable to prevent widespread burning and looting. The upheaval reached its climax on the night of August 13. Crowds of angry African Americans surged through Watts. Arsonists began the systematic destruction of whole city blocks in the ghetto. Police and firemen faced added peril from snipers who took up positions in the ruins. At its height, the riot encompassed an area of more than fifty blocks. Reaction In the early hours of August 14, law enforcement officers began to regain control of the streets. At the request of city officials, National Guard troops joined the Los Angeles Police Department in battling the rioters. Ultimately, nearly fourteen thousand members of the National Guard entered the fray. Burning and looting continued sporadically, but the presence of fully armed soldiers in large numbers gradually restored quiet to the riot-torn area. A dusk-to-dawn curfew went into effect on Saturday night, August 14. Three days later the curfew was lifted, and most of the National Guard troops left the city. Amid the rubble, the people of Watts returned to their everyday concerns. The six days of rioting

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had wreaked widespread destruction on the African American neighborhood. Thirty-four deaths were reported, and police made more than three thousand arrests. Property damage reached the forty-million-dollar mark, as 288 businesses and private buildings and 14 public buildings were damaged and/or looted, and 1 public and 207 private buildings were destroyed. Yet the most significant harm caused by the riot was beyond specific assessment. In the realm of race relations, the outbreak of violence exacerbated tensions between black and white people throughout the United States. Watts became the first chapter in a history of race riots that included upheavals in Detroit, Michigan, and Newark, New Jersey, in 1967, and Washington, D.C., in 1968. Faced with repeated outbreaks of violence, the Civil Rights movement, with its emphasis on civil disobedience and interracial cooperation, suffered a significant setback in the short run. Beginning with the explosion at Watts, U.S. race relations entered a new, more ominous phase. The riot did not, however, mean the end of nonviolent direct action or the total reversal of the multiracial cooperation that had brought important legal victories for desegregation in the United States. The history of civil rights reform after 1965 was marked by a growing realization that the socioeconomic conditions in which African Americans, Mexican Americans, and members of other minorities lived could not be ignored in the quest for social justice and personal fulfillment for all U.S. citizens. The last major effort by civil rights leader Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.—who visited Watts at the time of the rioting and asked the insurgents to change their motto from “Burn, baby, burn” to “Build, baby, build”—was a Poor People’s Campaign that was implemented two months after his assassination on April 4, 1968. John G. Clark Updated by Thomas R. Peake Further Reading The Governor’s Commission on the Los Angeles Riots’ Violence in the City: An End or a Beginning? (Los Angeles: Author, 1965) focuses on the details and location of damage, with useful maps. Thomas R. Peake’s Keeping the Dream Alive: A History of the

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Southern Christian Leadership Conference from King to the NineteenEighties (New York: Peter Lang, 1987) includes extensive material on the urban riots and post-1965 efforts to deal with social problems in big-city ghettos. David O. Sears and John B. McConahay’s The Politics of Violence: The New Urban Blacks and the Watts Riot (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1973) reviews the history of the crisis, the views and actions of urban blacks, and official reactions. The Watts Writers’ Workshop’s From the Ashes: Voices of Watts, edited and with an introduction by Budd Schulberg (New York: New American Library, 1967), contains writings by residents of Watts during the time of the 1965 riots and their aftermath, showing their frustrations as well as their hopes for better answers to social, personal, and economic problems. See also Chicago riots; Congress of Racial Equality; “I Have a Dream” speech; Los Angeles riots; Miami riots; National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders; New York riots; Newark riot; Race riots of 1943; Race riots of 1967; Race riots of the twentieth century; Washington, D.C., riots

West Indians Definition: Americans of West Indian, or Caribbean, origins or ancestry The success of black West Indian Americans in the United States has drawn the attention of sociologists and other scholars and created some conflict with other African Americans. Black West Indian immigrants from the former British West Indian Islands, Belize and Guyana, and their U.S.-born descendants, a small group among the African American population, have achieved considerable economic, educational, and political success in the United States relative to other African Americans. Notable conservatives such as economist Thomas Sowell of Stanford’s Hoover Institution and author Dinesh D’Souza contend that this group’s relative success in part demonstrates the error in attributing the economic and social plight of some African Amer-

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icans exclusively to racism. The group’s exceptionalism has also been noted by sociologists such as Stephen Steinberg in The Ethnic Myth: Race, Ethnicity, and Class in America (1981) and Reynolds Farley and Walter Allen in The Color Line and the Quality of Life in America (1989). The portrayal of exceptionalism is only part of this group’s profile. Structural shifts in the U.S. economy mean that segments of this community will face severe sociopsychological adjustments to migration, coupled with constricted assimilation into American society. Pressures against full assimilation are greater for lower-class West Indians. Typically, middle- and upper-class professionals alternate between a more inclusive West Indian American or particularistic African American identity, and the lower/working class chooses a more ethnically focused, West Indian identity. Most of the West Indian immigrants arrived in the United States in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In 1924, restrictive immigration legislation effectively halted immigration from the islands. Most of the immigrants settled in the Northeast, creating urban ethnic communities in Miami, Boston, Newark (New Jersey), Hartford (Connecticut), and New York City; they settled in Brooklyn and formed ethnic enclaves in East Flatbush, Flatbush, Crown Heights, Canarsie, and Midwood districts. West Indian Exceptionalism Generally, West Indian immigrants have been perceived as models of achievement for their frugality, emphasis on education, and ownership of homes and small businesses. Economist Sowell argued that the group’s successes, including those of famous members such as General Colin Powell, derived from a distinctive cultural capital source and an aggressive migrant ideology, legacies of their native lands. Home ownership and economic entrepreneurship were financed partly by using a cultural source of capital, an association called susu (known in West Africa as esusu), that first reached the West Indian societies during slavery. A susu facilitates savings, small-scale capital formation, and micro lending. These traditional associations have been incorporated into mainstream financial organizations such as credit un-

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Actor Sidney Poitier, at left in this scene from the 1967 film In the Heat of the Night, was born in Florida; however, his parents were West Indian, and he was raised in the Bahamas. (Museum of Modern Art, Film Stills Archive)

ions and mortgage and commercial banks as they adapt to serve the needs of West Indian Americans. Demographer Albert Murphy, in a report for Medgar Evers College’s Caribbean Research Center in New York, found that in 1990, 29.1 percent of West Indian Americans had a bachelor’s degree or higher degree, compared with the U.S. average of 20.3 percent. In addition, their median household income in 1989 was $28,000, compared with $19,750 for African Americans overall and $31,435 for whites. Political and Social Incorporation Early immigrants such as Pan-Africanists Edward Blyden and Marcus Garvey and poet activist Claude McKay were among the first West Indian Americans to become well-known and wellrespected figures. Other famous West Indian Americans are Congresswoman Shirley Chisholm; Franklin Thomas, former head of the Ford Foundation; federal judge Constance Baker Motley; Nobel laureate Derek Walcott; and actor Sidney Poitier. Activist Stokely Carmichael, Deputy U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder,

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and Earl Graves, businessman and publisher of Black Enterprise, have made impressive efforts on behalf of African Americans. From the 1930’s to the 1960’s, West Indian American politicians were elected with the help of the African American vote; many of the West Indians, believing their stay in the United States to be temporary, did not become citizens and were thus ineligible to vote. In the 1970’s, this trend changed, and two congressional districts in New York with heavy concentrations of West Indians became represented by African Americans. However, West Indians Americans, becoming increasingly dissatisfied with African American representation, have been fielding their own candidates in state and local elections in New York, Connecticut, and New Jersey. These efforts have been aided by the fact that since 1993, when legislation less favorable to the immigrant population was passed, West Indian Americans have been acquiring U.S. citizenship in greater numbers. Differential Assimilation At the beginning of the twentieth century, West Indian Americans and African Americans held negative stereotypes of each other and rarely interacted socially. In the 1930’s, 1940’s, and 1950’s, the children of some West Indian immigrants downplayed their ethnicity and attempted to integrate into the African American community, but both groups’ images of each other changed slowly. Powell, in his autobiography, My American Journey (1995), recalls his African American father-in-law’s reaction when he proposed marriage to his daughter Alma: “All my life I’ve tried to stay away from those damn West Indians and now my daughter’s going to marry one!” The late 1960’s, with its emphasis on racial solidarity and group identity, eroded much of the conflict between African Americans and West Indian Americans and supplanted it with black nationalist sentiments and identity. In the late twentieth century, many West Indian Americans were caught in an identity crisis, unsure of whether they should be West Indians with a strong ethnic orientation, African Americans with a focus on their racial identity, or “West Indian Americans” with a more hybrid identity. Class pressures play influential roles in this iden-

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tity dilemma. Lower- and working-class West Indian Americans have strong affiliations with their ethnicity and its cultural symbols, using the ethnic community as a “structural shield” in their coping repertoire. However, a growing segment of West Indian American professionals regard themselves as West Indian Americans because this identity unites the more desirable choices by eliminating obstacles to their ultimate assimilation as Americans. In addition, this community is not monolithic, and class divisions segment the group as well as influence its responses to racism and other societal challenges. Aubrey W. Bonnett Further Reading Black Identities: West Indian Immigrant Dreams and American Realities (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1999), by Mary C. Waters, and Crosscurrents: West Indian Immigrants and Race (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), by Milton Vickerman, both examine the West Indian immigrant experience in the United States. Ira De Augustine Reid’s The Negro Immigrant: His Background, Characteristics, and Social Adjustment, 18991937 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1939) is a classic study of the early pioneers. Other excellent sources are Aubrey W. Bonnett’s Institutional Adaptation of West Indian Immigrants to America (Washington, D.C.: University Press of America, 1982), Philip Kasinitz’s Caribbean New York: Black Immigrants and the Politics of Race (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1992), Ransford W. Palmer’s Pilgrims from the Sun: West Indian Migration to America (New York: Twayne Publishers, 1995), Irma Watkins-Owens’s Blood Relations: Caribbean Immigrants and the Harlem Community, 1900-1930 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1996), Robert Carr’s Black Nationalism in the New World: Reading the AfricanAmerican and West Indian Experience (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2002), and Calvin Holder’s “The Rise of the West Indian Politicians in New York City,” in Afro-Americans in New York Life and History (4, 1980). See also Cubans and African Americans; Haitians; Jamaicans; Pan-Africanism

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White Citizens’ Councils Identification: Prosegregation bodies that arose in the American South following the U.S. Supreme Court’s 1954 decree that public schools must be racially integrated Date: First councils formed during the summer of 1954 The highly popular White Citizens’ Councils led the fight to prevent integration throughout the South during the mid-1950’s. On May 17, 1954, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in Brown v. Board of Education that racial segregation of public schools was unconstitutional. This decision held special significance in the South, where African American students traditionally attended separate, poorly funded schools. Many southern communities were outraged at this threat to what they regarded as white privilege. In response, white citizens quickly organized to impede attempts at integration. The White Citizens’ Councils became a prominent force in this resistance movement. The inspiration for organized white resistance came from a strident speech delivered by Tom Brady, a Mississippi circuit court judge, shortly after the Supreme Court’s decision. Later expanded into a ninety-page tract titled Black Monday, Brady’s speech was distributed widely and served as a rallying cry for concerned white citizens. Robert B. Patterson, a plantation manager, responded by organizing influential citizens of Indianola, Mississippi, into the first chapter of the White Citizens’ Council. Other chapters quickly sprung up, predominantly in communities that possessed small white populations and where civil rights organizations were active. The councils’ memberships largely consisted of middle-class whites who possessed influence in their communities, such as business owners, lawyers, judges, bankers, politicians, and doctors. The councils were viewed as the “respectable” alternative to violent segregationist groups such as the Ku Klux Klan. Determined to present their members as responsible, upstanding citizens, they publicly encouraged legal acts of resistance. Often they used propaganda to educate the public. The propaganda typi-

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cally attempted to unify white communities into fighting integration by linking it to communism, depicting African Americans as inferior, and disparaging leading civil rights organizations. Nevertheless, some councils used more disturbing and underhanded means of achieving their ends. For example, in his book The Fiery Cross (1987), Wyn Wade reported that a council in Mississippi retaliated against a group of African Americans who supported integration by prominently publishing their names and addresses in a local newspaper. As a result, some of the African Americans lost their jobs; others were intimidated into moving from the town. By 1956, membership in the councils reached a peak of between 250,000 and 300,000 southerners. At this time, a sufficient number of council chapters had been established to prompt the creation of a national organization called the Citizens’ Councils of America. Despite the grassroots attempts of middle-class southerners to defend their racist traditions, their efforts ultimately failed. By the early 1960’s, the influence of the White Citizens’ Councils had dwindled in the face of the gains made by the Civil Rights movement and by the rising popularity of the Ku Klux Klan. Nonetheless, the councils did demonstrate that appeals to racial division could resonate powerfully in the political arena. Thus, they served as forerunners to later neo-Confederate organizations such as the Council of Conservative Citizens. Beth A. Messner Further Reading Diamond, Sara. “Organized Resistance to Preserve Segregation.” In Roads to Dominion: Right-Wing Movements and Political Power in the United States. New York: Guilford Press, 1995. Diamond chronicles the development and influence of right-wing thought in the United States and helps readers understand the place of the White Citizens’ Councils within this larger movement. McMillen, Neil R. The Citizens’ Council: Organized Resistance to the Second Reconstruction, 1954-1964. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1971. Perhaps the most definitive treatise on the White

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Citizens’ Councils, this text discusses the organization’s inception, evolution, and eventual decline. Wade, Wyn. The Fiery Cross: The Ku Klux Klan in America. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1987. Although primarily a discussion of the Ku Klux Klan, there is some discussion about the role of the White Citizens’ Councils in the prosegregation movement. See also Brown v. Board of Education; Civil Rights movement; Ku Klux Klan; Little Rock school desegregation crisis; Montgomery bus boycott; School desegregation; Southern Manifesto

White primaries Definition: Elections designed to exclude African Americans from voting In cases on which it ruled from 1927 to 1953, the U.S. Supreme Court declared white primaries to be unconstitutional state actions that are prohibited by the equal protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. In Newberry v. United States (1921), the Supreme Court declared that primaries were not constitutionally protected as elections and could not be controlled by Congress. Although African Americans could not be prevented from voting in federal elections, southern legislatures used Newberry to prohibit African Americans from voting in primaries. In the southern states, which were dominated by the Democratic Party, the only significant competition occurred at the primary level, within the party. Thus, inability to participate in a primary in these states meant effective disfranchisement. The first challenge to the white primary, Nixon v. Herndon (1927), resulted in a unanimous decision for the African American plaintiff. Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes held that the Texas white primary law violated the equal protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. In Nixon v. Condon (1932), the Court invalidated a Texas Democratic Party executive committee or-

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der excluding African Americans from voting in primaries. However, in Grovey v. Townsend (1935), a unanimous Court ruled that white primaries were the elections of a private organization and not forbidden as state action. United States v. Classic (1941), dealing with corrupt voting in Louisiana, held that primaries selecting nominees for federal office were protected. Applying Classic, the Court reversed Grovey in Smith v. Allwright (1944). Terry v. Adams (1953) invalidated the preprimary of the Jaybird Democratic Association as a denial of equal protection and removed the final institutional obstacle to African American voting. Gilbert Morris Cuthbertson See also Fifteenth Amendment; Gerrymandering; Grandfather clauses; Grovey v. Townsend; Nixon v. Condon; Nixon v. Herndon; Politics and government; Poll taxes; Smith v. Allwright; Terry v. Adams; United States v. Classic; Voting Rights Act of 1965

Wilder’s election to Virginia governorship The Event: Election of the first African American state governor since Reconstruction Date: November 7, 1989 Place: Virginia L. Douglas Wilder became the first elected African American governor nearly 125 years after the end of the Civil War; however, his tenure as governor brought little substantive change in Virginia, and his legacy is difficult to assess. The 1989 contest for the governor’s mansion in Virginia was destined to receive an unusual amount of attention both within the state and around the country. The election offered the possibility of producing the first elected black governor in the former capital of the Confederacy. In addition, there were few other contests of national importance in 1989 to attract the interest of the news me-

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dia. Each of the candidates spent more than $6 million in the general election campaign. History was made when, on November 7, 1989, Democrat L. Douglas Wilder was elected governor of Virginia. Nomination Wilder, the incumbent lieutenant governor, received the Democratic nomination without challenge. He had proven his ability to win a statewide election when he became lieutenant governor in 1985, demonstrating that he could attract white voters in a state whose electorate was 80 percent white. Wilder received the full support of the state Democratic Party and of outgoing governor Gerald L. Baliles and the less-than-enthusiastic endorsement of U.S. senator Charles S. Robb. There was friction between Wilder and Robb, but Robb did support Wilder’s candidacy. Marshall Coleman, the Republican gubernatorial candidate, had scored a come-from-behind victory in a hotly contested and often acrimonious three-man race for his party’s nomination. For the first time, state Republicans employed a primary election to choose their candidate, and the Coleman campaign was noted for its strong negative content. Coleman had lost the 1981 gubernatorial election and was denied the Republican nomination for lieutenant governor in 1985, but he was resurrected politically in 1989. By the 1980’s, America had witnessed an increasing number of successful African American candidates at the local and state legislative levels. Many of America’s largest cities had elected black mayors. The number of African Americans in statewide office and at the national level, however, remained low. At the time of Wilder’s election, African Americans held fewer than 2 percent of the nation’s elective offices. Most of those were in jurisdictions with a majority of black residents. Wilder’s candidacy was seen, then, as extremely important for civil rights in America. Wilder himself was viewed as a model for other black candidates. His campaign was not based on race. His campaign strategy was to portray himself as a moderate alternative to the extremely conservative Coleman.

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Although Wilder’s politics were clearly more moderate than the positions favored by former presidential candidate Jesse Jackson, Wilder may have benefited from Jackson’s experience. Black candidates, who have often been dismissed by voters on the basis of their race, may have been taken more seriously after Jackson’s campaigns in 1984 and, particularly, 1988. Opponents and the media, however, still struggled with the issues surrounding black candidacies. Heavy criticism of a black candidate could lead to charges of racism, while ignoring or emphasizing the race of a black candidate could be viewed as patronizing. The Election Campaign In 1989, African Americans faced major electoral hurdles, not the least of which was the misleading nature of public opinion polls in black-white contests. Usually reliable, polls in elections in which a black candidate faced a white candidate tended to overestimate the strength of the black candidates by several percentage points. This phenomenon was evident in the Wilder election as well as in the New York City mayoral campaign of David Dinkins and the unsuccessful California gubernatorial campaign of Los Angeles mayor Tom Bradley. Experts speculated that the effect might be caused by racism, low turnout among black voters, fear of those polled of appearing racist, or their attempt to offer what might be perceived as the “correct answer.” Although Wilder faced many of these problems, his candidacy also posed problems for his opponent. The race factor was virtually absent from the campaigns of both candidates. Coleman’s campaign was relatively negative but was careful not even to allude to the question of race. The only exception to this came late in the campaign, when Coleman complained publicly that he was the victim of a media double standard in which Wilder was not seriously questioned regarding several ethics issues raised by Coleman. Coleman, conversely, was frequently questioned about his position on abortion. The implication was that Wilder was getting preferential treatment from the press because he was black. For his part, Wilder was equally careful not to raise the race issue. He did discuss his background, but he chose to emphasize

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how far Virginia had come in matters of race. His attempt to run as a moderate also prevented him from running as a “black” candidate. In his television advertisements, Wilder was usually surrounded by whites. His issue emphasis was almost solely on abortion, on which issue he endorsed a woman’s right to choose. His theme was summed up by his campaign motto, “I trust the women of Virginia.” One of Wilder’s most popular campaign advertisements used conservative rhetoric to take a prochoice position. In the advertisement, a narrator claimed that “Doug Wilder believes the government shouldn’t interfere in your right to choose. He wants to keep politicians out of your personal life. Don’t let Marshall Coleman take us back.” This strategy effectively made Wilder look at least moderate, if not conservative, and it may well have been a subtle reference to the overt racism of Virginia’s past. Wilder avoided some more controversial issues. There was no discussion of funding abortions for the poor. Wilder also chose not to associate himself with Jesse Jackson or the National Organization for Women’s Molly Yard, emphasizing that he had not requested any help from outside the state. Wilder’s Background Wilder’s qualifications and experience were never questioned. The grandson of slaves, Wilder grew up in a middle-class family in segregated Richmond. He excelled in the segregated schools, and he was graduated from Virginia Union College in Richmond. After winning a Bronze Star for his actions during the Korean War, he attended law school at Howard University. In 1959, Wilder was the only African American to pass the Virginia bar exam, and he soon opened his own law practice. Wilder rose rapidly within his profession, and in 1969 he entered politics, winning a seat in the Virginia senate. Two white candidates split the white vote, allowing Wilder to win by a narrow margin. He worked diligently and established a reputation as a powerful individual in Virginia politics. Initially a liberal, Wilder moderated his positions and issues over time. By 1985, he was ready for a run for lieutenant governor, and some clever po-

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litical maneuvering placed him on the Democratic ticket with Gerald Baliles. Successful grassroots campaigning enabled him to win that election and position himself for the gubernatorial race in 1989. With his election as lieutenant governor, Wilder became only the second African American elected to a major statewide office since Reconstruction. (Former Republican senator Edward Brooke of Massachusetts was the first. P. B. S Pinchback was acting governor of Louisiana for forty-three days in 1873 but was never elected to that position.) Election On November 7, 1989, Wilder eked out a narrow victory over Marshall Coleman, capturing 50.1 percent of the votes cast. Nearly 1.8 million Virginians voted in the contest, which set records both for the total number of voters and for the 66.5 percent of registered voters who cast a ballot. While his margin of victory was considerably narrower than those of the Democratic nominees for lieutenant governor and attorney general, Wilder had once again fooled the political pundits and accomplished what seemed to be impossible. Many experts attributed his victory to heavy turnout among black voters and his popularity among women, but it should be remembered that Wilder took more than 40 percent of the votes cast by whites and more than 40 percent of the votes cast by men. The impact of Wilder’s election was felt in three specific areas: the national stature and reputation of Wilder himself, the nation’s and the state’s view of Virginia, and the possible long-term effects on black candidates nationwide. Wilder’s election propelled him into the national spotlight. He came to be seen by many as a national spokesperson for African Americans and as a viable candidate for the 1992 Democratic presidential nomination. Wilder welcomed this notoriety and spent much time preparing and delivering speeches around the country. Perceptions of Virginia also changed virtually overnight. The state had changed dramatically in the previous two decades, but the changes had gone largely unnoticed. An urbanized corridor running from northern Virginia through Richmond into Tidewa-

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ter produced more than 60 percent of the voters. Many of these voters had migrated to Virginia, many from the North, and they voted disproportionately for Wilder. The rural areas of Virginia, which had dominated the state’s politics, now accounted for less than one-third of the state’s votes. These major demographic changes made Virginia politically more like a Middle Atlantic state than a southern state. Virginia politics would still be considered conservative nationally, but the state had moderated considerably in twenty years. The lessons of the election for other black candidates were mixed. Wilder’s victory showed that an African American willing to run as a mainstream, moderate, nonthreatening candidate could win a statewide election. This contrasted sharply with the liberal approach taken by Jesse Jackson. Jackson’s philosophy was successful within the Democratic Party, where liberals wielded considerable power, but Wilder’s strategy seemed much more likely to be successful in general elections. Other lessons were drawn from the election. The journey for a minority candidate was still a long and difficult one. Wilder had many advantages in the campaign. He was the heir apparent to two popular Democratic administrations, he won the party’s nomination unopposed, and he was supported by a united party. His campaign was well financed. He ran a strategic campaign, played the issues correctly, and was opposed by a relatively weak opponent. Despite all these advantages, he won by an extremely narrow margin. Impact Combined with the election of David Dinkins as the first black mayor of New York City, Wilder’s win was seen by some as the vanguard of more political successes by African Americans. Andrew Young’s losing campaign for the governorship of Georgia the following year caused much of that optimism to disappear. The effects of the Wilder victory on Virginia politics and public policy are difficult to assess. There were still relatively few black politicians in the state. Policy, too, remained largely unchanged. Governor Wilder was prevented from proposing any

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governmental initiatives by a continuing budget crisis that allowed him to show his fiscal conservative stripes through a steadfast refusal to raise taxes and an insistence on serious budget cuts. The consequence of these actions was a decline in Wilder’s popularity within the state and a rise in his stock nationally. Wilder’s legacy seemed likely to be the subject of debate for years to come. Harry L. Wilson Further Reading Bond, Julian. Black Candidates: Southern Campaign Experiences. Atlanta: Southern Regional Council, 1968. A recounting of the experiences of several candidates for state and local office in the South in the 1960’s. Provides an interesting context for the Wilder election and exemplifies the changes in the South and the nation with regard to race relations. Broh, C. Anthony. A Horse of a Different Color: Television’s Treatment of Jesse Jackson’s 1984 Presidential Campaign. Washington, D.C.: Joint Center for Political Studies, 1987. A thorough and insightful discussion of how the media covered the first serious black presidential candidate. Points out clearly the disadvantages and advantages of being a black candidate. Edds, Margaret. Claiming the Dream. Chapel Hill, N.C.: Algonquin Books, 1990. A chronological journalistic recounting and analysis of the 1989 gubernatorial campaign focusing primarily on Wilder. Lichter, S. Robert, et al. The Video Campaign: Network Coverage of the 1988 Primaries. Washington, D.C.: American Enterprise Institute, 1988. A brief, useful analysis of how television news covered the presidential candidates in 1988. Makes good use of statistics to present a clear and easily understood argument regarding who was treated well by the media and why. Sabato, Larry J. “Virginia’s National Election for Governor.” In Virginia Government and Politics, edited by Thomas R. Morris and Weldon Cooper. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1990. An excellent discussion of the national and state implications of the 1989 gubernatorial election by the leading expert on Virginia state politics. Sabato provides both

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statistical and anecdotal analyses of the campaign and election. Shapiro, Walter. “Breakthrough in Virginia.” Time 134 (November 20, 1989): 54-57. Emphasizes the moderate politics and personal nature of Wilder’s campaign and victory. Wilder is seen as a politician, not as a black politician. Wilson, Harry L. “Media Treatment of Black Candidates: The 1989 Virginia Gubernatorial Campaign.” Virginia Social Science Journal 26 (Winter, 1991): 82-90. An analysis of newspaper and television coverage in southwestern Virginia of the election. Concludes that although most news stories were neutral, those that were not were likely to be positive if about Wilder and negative if about Coleman. Yancey, Dwayne. When Hell Froze Over. Dallas: Taylor, 1988. Journalist Yancey traces Wilder’s rise to power from his humble beginnings in Richmond to his election to lieutenant governor in 1985. Reveals the political Wilder who seeks and uses power. See also Chisholm’s election to Congress; Jackson’s run for the presidency; Politics and government; Voting Rights Act of 1965

Williams v. Mississippi The Case: U.S. Supreme Court ruling on jury composition Date: April 25, 1898 In Williams v. Mississippi, the Supreme Court ignored a ruling it had made a dozen years earlier and upheld the murder conviction of an African American in a trial in which no African Americans served on the jury. Williams, an African American from Mississippi, had been convicted of murder by an all-white jury. Williams argued, in line with Yick Wo v. Hopkins (1886), that his indictment and conviction by all-white grand and petit juries violated the Fourteenth Amendment’s equal protection clause. At the time in Mississippi, African Americans were effectively excluded from jury service

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because only qualified voters could serve, and poll taxes and literacy tests rendered most African Americans unable to vote. The Court distinguished Yick Wo and its principle that a racially fair law could be voided if it was administered in a discriminatory manner from the facts of this case, saying that Williams did not prove that the actual practice of Mississippi’s suffrage laws was unfair. As a result of this ruling, other southern states quickly followed Mississippi and passed laws designed to prevent African Americans from voting. White primaries, poll taxes, and literacy tests became common in the South until white primaries were banned in the 1940’s and discriminatory voting practices were stopped by the 1964 and 1965 Voting Rights Acts. Richard L. Wilson See also Batson v. Kentucky; Council of Federated Organizations; Edmonson v. Leesville Concrete Company; Fourteenth Amendment; Powers v. Ohio; Strauder v. West Virginia; Voting Rights Act of 1965

Wisconsin v. Mitchell The Case: U.S. Supreme Court ruling on freedom of speech Date: June 11, 1993 The Supreme Court upheld the constitutionality of a state law that increased the sentence for a crime in which the defendant intentionally selected the victim on the basis of race, national origin, religion, sexual orientation, or similar characteristics. Following a showing of the 1988 film Mississippi Burning, several African American men and boys congregated at an apartment complex to talk about the film. After a discussion of a scene in the film in which a young African American boy is beaten by a white man, the accused, Todd Mitchell, asked those who joined him outside if they were ready to go after a white man. Walking on the opposite side of the street and saying nothing, fourteen-year-old Gregory Riddick approached the complex. Mitchell selected three individuals from the group to go after Riddick. The victim was beaten, and his tennis shoes were stolen.

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In a Kenosha, Wisconsin, trial court, Mitchell was convicted as a party to the crime of aggravated battery. By Wisconsin law, this crime carried a maximum prison sentence of two years. Mitchell’s sentence was extended to four years, however, under a state statute commonly known as the “hate crimes” statute. This statute provided for sentence extensions if it could be determined that the victim was selected because of his or her race, religion, color, disability, sexual orientation, national origin, or ancestry. Mitchell appealed his conviction and the extended sentence. His conviction was upheld by the court of appeals, but the Supreme Court of Wisconsin reversed the decision of the appellate court. Wisconsin’s Supreme Court held that the “hate crimes” statute violated the defendant’s First Amendment protection for freedom of speech because it was unconstitutionally overbroad and punished only what the state legislature found to be offensive. Moreover, the state supreme court believed that this statute would have a “chilling effect” on a citizen’s freedom of speech; that is, a citizen would fear reprisal for actions that might follow the utterance of prejudiced or biased speech. The U.S. Supreme Court reversed the state court’s decision. Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist wrote the opinion in this unanimous decision. The Court held that Mitchell’s First Amendment rights to free speech had not been violated. The Court pointed out that the statute was not aimed at speech but at conduct, which is not protected by the First Amendment. The Court also addressed the concern about the “chilling effect” of the statute, finding that such would not be the case and that the state supreme court’s hypothesis was far too speculative to be entertained. This decision indicates that the U.S. Supreme Court appears ready to uphold legislation designed to enhance punishment for criminal acts based on bigotry and bias without making bigoted or biased speech itself a crime. Donna Addkison Simmons See also R.A.V. v. City of St. Paul

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World War II The Event: Worldwide conflict that the United States entered after Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor Date: United States entered the war on December 8, 1941; Japan’s surrender ended the war on August 14, 1945 Despite segregation and widespread discrimination, African Americans made important contributions to the American war effort. By linking racism at home with fascism abroad, civil rights activists promoted a “Double V” strategy—a victory against oppression at home as well as abroad. The Selective Service Act of 1940, which initiated a military draft, forbade racial discrimination in the recruitment and training of men, but it continued the traditional policy of segregation. When black leaders protested, President Franklin D. Roosevelt announced a policy of seeking to use African Americans in numbers approximately equal to their proportion of the national population, which was about 10 percent. Soon thereafter, Roosevelt promoted Colonel Benjamin O. Davis, Sr., to brigadier general, making him the first African American to hold this rank. He also appointed Judge William Hastie as a civilian aid to the secretary of war. The Home Front As U.S. involvement in the war approached and defense industries grew, African Americans grew dismayed by their lack of employment opportunities in businesses contracting with the government. Hoping to promote change, A. Philip Randolph and other black leaders organized the March on Washington movement in early 1941, hoping to involve 150,000 protesters. Roosevelt persuaded the organizers to call off the demonstration in exchange for his issuing Executive Order 8802, which formally prohibited discrimination in defense industries because of “race, creed, color, or national origin.” To implement its provisions, the order created the Fair Employment Practices Committee (FEPC), the first federal agency devoted to combating racial discrimination.

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Although the FEPC lacked enforcement powers, the booming defense industries soon had such a need for labor that African Americans increasingly secured factory jobs. They constituted only 3 percent of American defense workers in 1942, but that proportion increased to 8 percent by 1945. In the automobile industry, representation of African Americans grew to about 12 percent of the United Auto Workers in Detroit. With the growth of job opportunities in the North and California, more than a half-million African Americans migrated out of the South. Many instances of ugly racial violence occurred during the war years. Authorities reported fourteen instances of racially inspired lynchings, with two black soldiers among the victims. In 1943 alone, researchers at Fisk University recorded 242 instances of racial fighting in forty-seven cities. The most destructive conflict took place in Detroit, where a minor skirmish among teenagers escalated into bitter fighting in which at least twentyfive African Americans and nine white Americans were killed. A few weeks later, in Harlem, a disagreement between a black soldier and a white police officer set off a race riot that resulted

Marine recruits negotiating an obstacle course during their training. (National Archives)

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in six deaths, 550 arrests, and five million dollars in property damage. The War Front During the course of the nearly four years that the United States fought in the war, almost one million African Americans served in the armed services. About half of them served overseas, in the European and Pacific theaters of the war. Nevertheless, due mostly to disparities in education and health, African Americans represented less than 6 percent of the military in 1942. Denied equal opportunities for combat service, they were assigned disproportional numbers of mundane tasks in areas such as supply and support. When Walter White, the secretary of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, investigated the morale of black soldiers abroad, he found that one of their most common complaints was that the backbreaking work of unloading supplies was often as dangerous to soldiers as fighting on the front lines. Despite these limitations, significant numbers of African Americans engaged in combat, often with great distinction. The most famous of them were the seven hundred pilots trained at the Tuskegee Air Force Base. These Tuskegee Airmen, as they were known, flew 15,533 sorties and destroyed 261 enemy planes. Sixty-six of the pilots were killed in action. In 1945, the 332d Fighter Group, commanded by Benjamin O. Davis, Jr., received a Presidential Unit Citation, and eighty of its pilots were awarded the Distinguished Flying Cross. This impressive record proved that African Americans, when given the chance, could become skilled pilots. In 1942, the Army reactivated two traditionally all-African American infantry divisions: the Ninety-second (buffalo soldiers) and the Ninety-third (Blue Helmets). Soldiers of the Ninetysecond Division, who were deployed in Italy, received more than 12,000 decorations. The Ninety-third Division fought in many bloody battles in the Solomon Islands, Treasury Island, and the Philippines in the South Pacific. Another unit, the highly decorated Back Panthers of the 761st Tank Battalion, engaged in some of the fiercest fighting at the Battle of the

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Enlisted men on their way to the Pacific theater of the war celebrate news of Japan’s surrender. (National Archives)

Bulge, after which they helped breech the Siegfried line and captured seven German towns. Nominated many times for a Presidential Unit Citation, the 761st finally received the award in 1978. Late in 1944, General Dwight Eisenhower approved a limited experiment of using racially integrated units. The experiment utilized African Americans who volunteered to fight with white troops. Out of 5,000 volunteers, 2,500 men were selected and organized into 37 platoons of 40 men each, which were then attached to white units containing 200 white soldiers. The integrated units fought in the Battle of the Bulge as well as on German soil. Although white officers reported that the experiment was an unqualified success, it was quietly discontinued at the end of the war because of fears of undermining white southern support for a postwar military draft. Many African Americans viewed a tragedy that occurred at the Navy base at Port Chicago, California, in 1944 as an illustration of the problem of unequal treatment in the military. While black sailors were loading ammunition there, the ammunition

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cargos of two ships exploded, killing 320 men, including 202 African Americans. When ordered to resume loading several weeks later, 258 black sailors refused to obey and called for improved safety procedures. The Navy court charged 50 of the sailors with mutiny and charged the remainder with lesser offenses. Those convicted of mutiny were sentenced to fifteen years in prison but were granted amnesty after the war. Controversy over the incident had one positive result: The loading of ammunition ceased being a “blacks only” assignment. Frequently the efforts of African Americans to oppose discrimination and segregation led to clashes on military bases. In July, 1944, for instance, Army lieutenant Jackie Robinson, the future baseball star, disobeyed a command to sit in the back of a military bus at Fort Hood, Texas. He was court-martialed but acquitted because the court ruled that the command had violated the Army’s antidiscriminatory policies in transportation. At Freeman Field, Indiana, more than a hundred black officer trainees were arrested and disciplined in 1945 for entering a club reserved for white officers. Second Lieutenant Roger Terry was courtmartialed and convicted of brushing against a superior officer when entering the club—a conviction that was not overturned until 1995. Demobilization Black soldiers returning home, even if wounded in action, continued to experience invidious discrimination in employment, education, and political rights. Even German prisoners of war held in the United States were treated with more respect and dignity. Conservative white southerners were ready to use violence against anyone challenging the Jim Crow system. In a highly publicized incident of 1946, Army veteran Isaac Woodward was attacked and blinded by policemen. President Harry S. Truman, incensed to learn of such events, created the President’s Committee on Civil Rights, which was charged with investigating discrimination and making proposals for change. Progress would be slow, but World War II helped put the issue of equal rights on the national agenda. Thomas Tandy Lewis

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Further Reading Hargrove, Hondon. Buffalo Soldiers in Italy: Black Americans in World War II. New York: McFarland, 2003. Homan, Lynn, and Thomas Reilly. Black Knights: The Story of the Tuskegee Airmen. Gretna, La.: Pelican Press, 2001. Honey, Maureen. Bitter Fruit: African American Women in World War II. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1999. Moore, Christopher. Fighting for America: Black Soldiers—the Unsung Heroes of World War II. New York: Random House, 2004. Morehouse, Maggie. Fighting the Jim Crow Army: Black Men and Women Remember World War II. New York: Rowman & Littlefield, 2002. Savage, Barbara. Broadcasting Freedom: Radio, War, and the Politics of Race, 1938-1948. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1999. Takaki, Ronald. Double Victory: A Multicultural History of America in World War II. New York: Little, Brown, 2000. Wilkerson, Martha, and Dominic Capaci. Layered Violence: The Detroit Rioters of 1943. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1991. Wynn, Neil. The Afro-American and the Second World War. London: P. Elek, 1976. See also Defense industry desegregation; Military; Military desegregation; Tuskegee Airmen; Vietnam War

Yarbrough, Ex parte The Case: U.S. Supreme Court ruling on voting rights Date: March 3, 1884 This 1884 decision is the only nineteenth century case in which the Supreme Court allowed the federal government to enforce the Fifteenth Amendment by punishing private individuals for obstructing a citizen’s right to vote. In Ex parte Yarbrough, also known as the Ku Klux Klan case, Jasper Yarbrough and his fellow Klansmen were convicted in federal

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court of using violence against an African American, Berry Saunders, to prevent him from voting in a federal election. The Supreme Court unanimously upheld the conviction. Justice Samuel F. Miller broadly interpreted the Fifteenth Amendment as a guarantee that a citizen must not be prevented from voting in federal elections because of his race. In James v. Bowman (1903), however, the Court ignored Yarbrough and held that congressional enforcement of the Fifteenth Amendment was limited to state action. Thomas Tandy Lewis See also Fifteenth Amendment; Voting Rights Act of 1965

Bibliography List of Categories General Reference . . . . History . . . . . . . . . . Affirmative Action. . . . African Americans and Other Minorities . . . Civil Rights . . . . . . . . Civil Rights Law . . . . . Crime . . . . . . . . . . . Desegregation . . . . . . Economics . . . . . . . . Education . . . . . . . . . Employment and Labor. Family and Community.

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1038 1040 1046 1047 1048 1050 1051 1053 1054

Hate and White Supremacy . . . . . Housing. . . . . . . . . Martin Luther King, Jr. The Media . . . . . . . Military . . . . . . . . . Politics . . . . . . . . . Religion and the Black Church . . . . . . . . Slavery . . . . . . . . . The South and Segregation . . . . .

. . . . . .

. . . . . .

. . . . . .

1055 1058 1059 1060 1062 1062

. . . 1064 . . . 1067 . . . 1074

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Hale, Grace Elizabeth. Making Whiteness: The Culture of Segregation in the South, 1890-1940. New York: Pantheon, 1998. McLaurin, Melton A. Separate Pasts: Growing Up White in the Segregated South. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1987. McMillen, Neil R. Dark Journey: Black Mississippians in the Age of Jim Crow. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1990. Newby, I. A. Jim Crow’s Defense. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1965. Odum, Howard W. Race and Rumors of Race: The American South in the Early Forties. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997. Packard, Jerrold M. American Nightmare: The History of Jim Crow. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2002. Perman, Michael. Struggle for Mastery: Disfranchisement in the South, 1888-1908. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001. Stokes, Melvyn, and Rick Halpern, eds. Race and Class in the American South Since 1890. Providence, R.I.: Berg, 1994. Williamson, Joel. A Rage for Order: Black-White Relations in the American South Since Emancipation. New York: Oxford University Press, 1986. Wilson, Theodore B. The Black Codes of the South. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1965. Woods, Jeff. Black Struggle, Red Scare: Segregation and Anti-communism in the South, 1948-1968. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2003. Woodward, C. Vann. The Strange Career of Jim Crow. Afterword by William S. McFeely. New York: Oxford University Press, 2002.

Time Line of African American History Year

Event

1619

First Africans are brought to the colony of Virginia as indentured servants.

1641

Massachusetts Bay Colony recognizes the legality of slavery.

1662

Virginia legislature rules that children of unions of slave and free parents are slave or free according to their mothers’ status.

1664

Maryland enacts the first law outlawing marriage between white women and black men.

1688

Pennsylvania Mennonites protest slavery.

1691

Virginia law restricts manumissions to prevent the growth of a free black class.

1712

Slave revolt in New York results in the execution of twenty-one slaves and the suicides of six others.

1723

Virginia denies African Americans the right to vote.

1739

South Carolina slaves rise up in Stono Rebellion (September 9).

1775

First abolitionist organization in the United States, the Pennsylvania Society for the Abolition of Slavery, is formed (April 14).

1784

First African American Masonic lodge is founded in Boston.

1786

Underground Railroad is started.

1787

The U.S. Constitution drafted in Philadelphia does not mention slavery by name but contains several clauses alluding to the existence of slaves and the slave trade.

1787

Free African Society is founded in Pennsylvania.

1787

Northwest Ordinance, governing the organization of the Northwest Territories, disallows slavery in the territories (July 13).

1793

Virginia outlaws entry of free African Americans into the state.

Time Line of African American History

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1077

Year

Event

1793

Federal Fugitive Slave Act requires the return of escaped slaves to their owners.

1793

Invention of the cotton gin encourages the spread of slavery in the South.

1808

Federal government bans importation of slaves into the United States, but illegal importation continues.

1816

American Colonization Society is founded.

1816

African Methodist Episcopal Church is founded (April 9).

1820

Congress enacts the Missouri Compromise, under which Missouri is admitted to the Union as a slave state, Maine is admitted as a free state, and slavery is prohibited in the remaining territories north of Missouri’s southern boundary (March 3).

1821

African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church is founded.

1827

First African American newspaper, Freedman’s Journal, begins.

1831

Nat Turner leads major slave insurrection in Virginia.

1831

Abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison begins publishing The Liberator (January 1).

1832

New England Anti-Slavery Society is organized.

1833

American Anti-Slavery Society is founded (December).

1839

Slaves being transported aboard the Spanish ship Amistad revolt and take control of the ship.

1841

Supreme Court’s decision in Groves v. Slaughter holds that an amendment to Mississippi’s state constitution that bans bringing slaves into the state for sale is not valid in the absence of legislation to enforce it (March 10).

1843

Sojourner Truth begins giving abolitionist lectures.

1847

Frederick Douglass publishes The North Star in Rochester, New York.

1850

Congress passes new Fugitive Slave Act to facilitate the return of slaves who flee from the South to the North.

1850

Compromise of 1850 allows for California’s admission to the Union as a nonslave state (September 20).

1078

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Time Line of African American History

Year

Event

1852

Harriet Beecher Stowe publishes Uncle Tom’s Cabin, a novel that attacks slavery.

1853

National Council of Colored People is founded in Rochester, New York (July 6).

1854

Congress passes the Kansas-Nebraska Act, a compromise between pro- and antislavery positions (May 30).

mid-1850’s Free-soil and proslavery factions fighting in Kansas—a period known in history as “Bleeding Kansas.” 1857

Ashmun Institute (later Lincoln University) is founded in Pennsylvania (January 1).

1857

Supreme Court’s Scott v. Sandford decision declares that slaves are not citizens of the United States and that the Missouri Compromise is unconstitutional (March 6-7).

1859

Capture of the slave ship Clotilde ends the delivery of slaves to the United States from abroad.

1859

Abolitionist John Brown is hanged after his October raid on the federal arsenal at Harpers Ferry, Virginia (December 2).

1861

Armed fighting in the Civil War begins (April).

1861

Congress passes first Confiscation Act to confiscate all property, including slaves, used in the Confederate war effort (August).

1862

Congress’s second Confiscation Act declares that seized slaves will not be returned to their Confederate owners and will later be freed (July).

1863

President Abraham Lincoln issues the Emancipation Proclamation, declaring slaves in states still in rebellion against the Union to be free (January 1).

1863

Draft riots erupt in New York City after the federal government enacts its first military conscription act (July).

1865

As southern states begin to enforce black codes, which severely limit liberties of newly freed African Americans, Radical Republicans in Congress began planning Reconstruction policies.

Time Line of African American History

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1079

Year

Event

1865

Federal government creates the Freedmen’s Bureau to assist African Americans make the transition from slavery to freedom (March 3).

1865

Civil War ends with Confederate commander Robert E. Lee’s formal surrender at Appomatox (April 9).

1865

Ratification of the Thirteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution prohibits slavery or other involuntary servitude (December 18).

1866

Ku Klux Klan is founded in Tennessee.

1866

Congress enacts the Civil Rights Act of 1866, declaring that persons born in the United States are, without regard to race, citizens of the United States entitled to equal protection of the law (April 9).

1868

Ratification of the Fourteenth Amendment grants citizenship to all persons born in the United States, without regard to race, and requires states to accord individuals equal protection of the law and due process of the law (July).

1870

Ratification of the Fifteenth Amendment guarantees the right to vote without regard to race, color, or previous condition of servitude (February).

1871

Congress enacts the Ku Klux Klan Act in an attempt to restrain the violence perpetrated by the organization.

1873

White terrorists kill more than sixty African Americans in Colfax, Mississippi (April 13).

1875

Congress enacts the Civil Rights Act of 1875, prohibiting racial discrimination in transportation, hotels, inns, theaters, and places of public amusement (March 1).

1875

Angry white mob kills more than twenty African Americans in Clinton, Mississippi (September 4-6).

1876

Supreme Court’s decision in United States v. Cruikshank limits the authority of the federal government to protect the civil rights of African Americans. (March 27).

1080

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Time Line of African American History

Year

Event

1876

Racially divisive fighting erupts between Republicans and Democrats during the months leading up to the presidential election in Charleston, South Carolina (September-November).

1877

Compromise of 1877 awards the presidency to Rutherford B. Hayes in return for a Republican promise to withdraw the last Union troops from the South, thus ending Reconstruction (January).

1880

Supreme Court’s decision in Strauder v. West Virginia holds that excluding African Americans from juries is a violation of the Fourteenth Amendment’s equal protection clause (March 1).

1881

Booker T. Washington founds the Tuskegee Institute.

1883

Supreme Court’s Civil Rights cases ruling declares the Civil Rights Act of 1875 unconstitutional (October 15).

1884

Ex parte Yarbrough is the Supreme Court’s only nineteenth century decision that allows the federal government to enforce the Fifteenth Amendment by punishing private individuals for obstructing a citizen’s right to vote (March 3).

1890

Supreme Court’s decision in Louisville, New Orleans, and Texas Railway Company v. Mississippi upholds Mississippi law requiring segregated accommodations on railroads (March 3).

1892

Colored Women’s League is founded in Washington, D.C. (June).

1895

Booker T. Washington offers his Atlanta Compromise in an address delivered at the Atlanta Exposition (September 18).

1896

National Association of Colored Women is founded.

1896

Supreme Court’s Plessy v. Ferguson decision establishes the separate but equal doctrine by holding that a legally mandated provision for separate railway cars for whites and blacks does not violate the equal protection clause (May 18).

Time Line of African American History

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1081

Year

Event

1899

In its Cumming v. Richmond County Board of Education decision, the Supreme Court refuses to enforce the “equal” stipulation in the separate but equal doctrine governing segregated schools (December 18).

1904

W. E. B. Du Bois articulates the concept of the “Talented Tenth.”

1905

Niagara Movement, predecessor of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, is organized with the help of W. E. B. Du Bois.

1906

Troop of African American soldiers are unfairly blamed for a shooting incident in Brownsville, Texas (August 13).

1910-1930’s More than one million African Americans move from the South to northern states in the Great Migration. 1910

National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) is founded (May).

1911

National Urban League is organized to protect the rights of African Americans who migrate to northern cities from the South (September 29).

1915

Supreme Court’s Guinn v. United States decision invalidates state voter literacy requirements intended to prevent African Americans from voting (June 21).

1916

Marcus Garvey arrives in the United States from Jamaica and becomes a leading advocate of black nationalism.

1917

Jamaican immigrant Marcus Garvey founds the first North American branch of his Universal Negro Improvement Association in New York City (May).

1917

Supreme Court’s Buchanan v. Warley decision strikes down state laws mandating racial segregation in housing (November 5).

1920’s-1935 Harlem Renaissance sees a flowering of black culture and racial pride. 1925

Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters is founded.

1927

Supreme Court’s Nixon v. Herndon decision finds unconstitutional the exclusion of blacks from voting in state Democratic primaries (March 7).

1082

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Time Line of African American History

Year

Event

1929

L. C. Dyer introduces antilynching bill in Congress.

1930

Wallace Fard founds the Nation of Islam in Detroit, Michigan.

1931

Trial of the Scottsboro Nine begins in Alabama.

1932-1972

U.S. Public Health Service conducts long-term study at Tuskegee, Alabama, of African American men afflicted with syphilis who think they are receiving treatment for their condition.

1935

Mary McLeod Bethune founds the National Council of Negro Women.

1935

Supreme Court’s decision in Grovey v. Townsend accepts the right of political parties to exclude African Americans from voting in primaries (April 1).

1938

Supreme Court’s Missouri ex rel. Gaines v. Canada decision holds that refusal of a state to allow African Americans to attend a state’s only public law school violates the equal protection clause (December 12).

1939

NAACP creates the Legal Defense and Educational Fund to oppose racially discriminatory laws, and Thurgood Marshall takes charge of these efforts.

1939

Contralto Marian Anderson performs from the steps of Washington, D.C.’s Lincoln Memorial (January 2).

1941

In response to A. Philip Randolph’s call for African Americans to march on Washington to protest racial discrimination in the armed forces, defense industries, and federal employment generally, President Franklin D. Roosevelt issues Executive Order 8802, which temporarily establishes the Fair Employment Practices Committee (June 25).

1941

United States enters World War II after Japan’s surprise attack on Pearl Harbor (December 8).

1942-1946

Black pilots who train for service in the U.S. Army Air Forces at Tuskegee, Alabama, become known as the Tuskegee Airmen.

1942

James Farmer and students at the University of Chicago establish the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE; June).

Time Line of African American History

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1083

Year

Event

1943

First sit-in demonstrations protesting segregation in Chicago (May-June).

1944

Supreme Court’s Smith v. Allwright decision finds that exclusion of African Americans from participation in party primaries violates the Constitution (April 3).

1944

United Negro College Fund is founded (April 25).

1946

President Harry S. Truman issues an executive order establishing the President’s Committee on Civil Rights (December 5).

1947

Jackie Robinson becomes the first African American in modern times to play Major League Baseball.

1947

Journey of Reconciliation attracts national attention to the civil rights work of the Congress of Racial Equality (April 9-23).

1948

Supreme Court’s Shelley v. Kraemer decision holds that the Constitution prevents state courts from enforcing racially restrictive real estate covenants (May 3).

1948

President Harry S. Truman signs Executive Order 9981 prohibiting racial discrimination in the armed forces and other federal employment (July 26).

1950

Supreme Court’s Sweatt v. Painter decision holds that Texas’s attempt to establish a separate law school for blacks rather than admit black applicants to the University of Texas Law School violates the equal protection clause. On the same day, the Court’s decision in McLaurin v. Oklahoma State Regents for Higher Education overrules Oklahoma’s policy of maintaining segregated programs for African Americans in a public university graduate school (June 5).

1953

Supreme Court’s decision in Terry v. Adams outlaws white primaries (May 4).

1954

Supreme Court’s Brown v. Board of Education decision finds that racial segregation in public schools violates the equal protection clause (May 17).

1954

First White Citizens’ Councils form, in reaction to Brown v. Board of Education (summer).

1084

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Time Line of African American History

Year

Event

1955

Supreme Court issues a second opinion in the Brown v. Board of Education case (Brown II), requiring desegregation of public schools “with all deliberate speed.”

1955

Rosa Parks’s defiance of segregated seating rules on a Montgomery, Alabama, bus touches off a year-long bus boycott.

1955

Fifteen-year-old African American Emmett Till is murdered in Mississippi after allegedly flirting with a white woman; a jury ultimately acquits two white men charged with his murder (August 28).

1956

Most southern members of Congress sign the “Southern Manifesto” denouncing the Supreme Court’s Brown v. Board of Education decision (March 12).

1957

Martin Luther King, Jr., and other African American leaders found the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC).

1957

Congress passes the first civil rights act since Reconstruction, banning discrimination in public places based on race, color, religion, or national origin.

1957

After Arkansas’s governor uses National Guard troops to block African American children from entering Little Rock’s Central High School, President Dwight D. Eisenhower federalizes the guard and mobilizes additional federal armed forces to ensure that the school is peacefully integrated (September).

1958

President Dwight D. Eisenhower meets with national African American leaders in the Summit Meeting of National Negro Leaders (June).

1958

Supreme Court’s decision in Cooper v. Aaron directs that fear of violence is not an acceptable excuse for delaying school desegregation (September 12).

1960

Supreme Court’s decision in Gomillion v. Lightfoot strikes down gerrymandering in Tuskegee, Alabama.

1960

Student sit-ins begin at lunch counters in Greensboro, North Carolina (February-July).

Time Line of African American History

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1085

Year

Event

1960

Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) is founded (April).

1960

Congress passes the Civil Rights Act of 1960, which expands protections of voting rights (May 6).

1961

President John F. Kennedy issues an executive order that establishes the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission and requires businesses with government contracts to take “affirmative action” in the equal treatment of employees.

1961

Freedom rides sponsored by CORE test the ban on segregation in interstate buses; riders are beaten, and a bus is burned in Birmingham, Alabama (May-August).

1962

President John F. Kennedy signs an executive order banning racial discrimination in federally financed housing.

1962

Voter registration drives begin in southern states under the direction of the Council of Federated Organizations (COFO).

1962

James Meredith enrolls in the University of Mississippi over the defiant protests of Governor Ross R. Barnett and in the face of mob violence.

1963

Birmingham March to protest segregation is sponsored by the SCLC (April 4-May 7).

1963

First African Liberation Day is celebrated (May 25).

1963

Medgar W. Evers, the field secretary for the Mississippi NAACP, is assassinated (June 12).

1963

March on Washington is sponsored by civil rights, labor, and religious organizations; featured speaker Martin Luther King, Jr., delivers his “I Have a Dream” speech (August 28).

1963

Four African American girls are killed when a bomb explodes at the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama (September 15).

1086

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Time Line of African American History

Year

Event

1964

Council of Federated Organizations (COFO), a group of associated civil rights groups, organizes the Freedom Summer project to register African Americans to vote in Mississippi.

1964

Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party is founded in Jackson, Mississippi.

1964

Ratification of the Twenty-fourth Amendment prohibits poll taxes in federal elections (January 23).

1964

Civil rights workers James Chaney, Michael Schwerner, and Andrew Goodman are murdered near Philadelphia, Mississippi (June).

1964

Congress passes the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which prohibits racial, religious, sexual, and other forms of discrimination in a variety of contexts (July 2).

1964

Supreme Court’s Heart of Atlanta Motel v. United States decision upholds the power of Congress to prohibit racial discrimination in privately owned hotels and inns (December 14).

1965

Moynihan Report attempts to explain the high levels of poverty in African American communities.

1965

Malcolm X is assassinated in New York City (February 21).

1965

Martin Luther King, Jr., leads a march from Selma to Montgomery, Alabama, to protest voting discrimination (March).

1965

Congress passes the Voting Rights Act.

1965

Watts riot flares in Los Angeles (August).

1966

Stokely Carmichael takes over leadership of SNCC and coins the phrase “Black Power” to advocate more militant responses to continued racial discrimination.

1966

Supreme Court’s decision in Harper v. Virginia Board of Elections outlaws poll taxes (March 24).

1966

Black Panther Party is organized in Oakland, California, by Bobby Seale and Huey P. Newton (October).

Time Line of African American History

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1087

Year

Event

1967

Summer race riots disrupt more than thirty northern cities.

1967

Supreme Court’s Loving v. Virginia decision holds that a state law barring interracial marriages is unconstitutional.

1967

President Lyndon Johnson appoints Thurgood Marshall to the U.S. Supreme Court (June 13).

1968

Republic of New Africa is founded in Detroit, Michigan.

1968

Kerner Commission (National Advisory Committee on Civil Disorders) releases its report concerning urban riots, claiming as key reasons white racism and increasing racial and economic stratification (February).

1968

Campus police in Orangeburg, South Carolina, kill three African American students (February 8).

1968

Martin Luther King, Jr., is assassinated in Memphis, Tennessee, a few days after leading a protest march for striking sanitation workers (April 4).

1968

Congress passes the Civil Rights Act of 1968, which prohibits discrimination in the sale and rental of housing and in home financing (April 11).

1968

Poor People’s March on Washington attempts to broaden the Civil Rights movement into a nonracial national campaign to reduce poverty (April 28-May 13).

1968

Supreme Court’s Green v. County School Board of Kent County decision finds that a “freedom of choice” plan adopted by a Virginia school district does not satisfy its obligation to desegregate its schools (May 27).

1968

Supreme Court’s Jones v. Alfred H. Mayer Co. decision finds that Congress has the power to prohibit racial discrimination in housing sales (June 17).

1968

Shirley Chisholm of New York is the first African American woman elected to Congress (November 5).

1969

Supreme Court’s Alexander v. Holmes County Board of Education decision requires southern school boards to desegregate their schools immediately.

1088

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Time Line of African American History

Year

Event

1969

Militant black leaders issue “Black Manifesto,” calling for white churches and synagogues to pay reparations to African Americans for the hardships of slavery (April 26).

1969

League of Revolutionary Black Workers is founded in Detroit, Michigan (June).

1970

Black members of Congress form the Congressional Black Caucus.

1971

National Black Women’s Political Leadership Caucus is founded.

1971

In Griggs v. Duke Power Company, the Supreme Court bans non-job-related tests that might unfairly screen minorities (March 8).

1971

Supreme Court’s Swann v. Charlotte-Mecklenburg Board of Education decision authorizes busing to desegregate the school district (April 20).

1971

Supreme Court’s Griffin v. Breckenridge decision upholds a federal law punishing racially motivated assaults on public highways (June 7).

1972

Congress passes Equal Employment Opportunity Act, which prohibits government agencies and educational institutions from discriminating in hiring, firing, promotion, compensation, and admission to training programs (March 13).

1973

Supreme Court’s decision in Keyes v. Denver School District No. 1, its first school desegregation case involving a major city outside the South, holds that a district-wide busing plan is an appropriate remedy for rectifying deliberately segregated schools (June 21).

1974

Combahee River Collective is founded.

1974

In Milliken v. Bradley, the Supreme Court holds that federal judges may not order the busing of students across school district lines (July 25).

Time Line of African American History

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1089

Year

Event

1975

Supreme Court’s Albemarle Paper Company v. Moody rules that employers guilty of racial discrimination in screening tests must compensate harmed employees with back pay.

1975

Congress passes the Voting Rights Act of 1975, which abolishes the use of literacy tests for voters (August 6).

1976

Alex Haley publishes Roots.

1976

Supreme Court’s Washington v. Davis decision holds that laws having a disproportionately burdensome effect on racial minorities are not subject to the same rigorous review as laws purposefully discriminating on grounds of race (June 7).

1978

Supreme Court’s Bakke case decision rules against the use of quotas to achieve racial balance in colleges and universities but allows an applicant’s race to be considered in the admissions process.

1979

Supreme Court’s United Steel Workers of America v. Weber decision upholds the ability of private employers to adopt affirmative action plans (June 27).

1980

Race riots leave eighteen people dead in Miami after four Miami police officers are acquitted of charges of beating a black insurance executive to death (May 17-23).

1980

In Fullilove v. Klutznick, the Supreme Court upholds minority set-aside contracts established by Congress for federal programs (July 2).

1983

Jesse Jackson founds the Rainbow Coalition.

1985

Philadelphia city government bombs a residential neighborhood to evict MOVE squatters (May 13).

1986

Supreme Court’s Batson v. Kentucky decision holds that a prosecutor’s attempt to disqualify possible jurors because of their race violates the equal protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment.

1986

Holiday honoring Martin Luther King, Jr., is celebrated officially for the first time.

1987

National Coalition of Blacks for Reparations in America is founded.

1090

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Time Line of African American History

Year

Event

1987

Three white teenagers are convicted of manslaughter following a racially motivated attack on three black men in the Howard Beach section of New York City a year earlier.

1987

Supreme Court’s McCleskey v. Kemp decision holds that mere proof of a racially disproportionate impact of death penalty sentences on African Americans does not violate the Constitution (April 22).

1988

Fair Housing Amendments Act establishes a procedure for imposing fines for those found guilty of housing discrimination based on race, color, sex, religion, or national origin.

1988

Jesse Jackson runs a strong second in the race for the Democratic nomination for the presidency.

1988

Congress passes the Civil Rights Restoration Act, restricting federal funding to institutions that discriminate on the basis of race, gender, disability or age, reversing a 1984 Supreme Court decision that narrowed the scope of federal antidiscrimination laws (March 22).

1989

Supreme Court’s Richmond v. J. A. Croson, Co. decision holds that state and local affirmative action programs must be subject to “strict scrutiny,” a constitutional standard requiring the most compelling government justifications.

1989

Following a 1988 federal court ruling that Mississippi judicial districts must be redrawn, voters elect five black trial court judges.

1989

In Martin v. Wilks, the Supreme Court allows white firefighters in Birmingham, Alabama, to challenge a 1981 court-approved affirmative action program designed to increase minority representation and promotion (June 12).

1989

Black honor student Yusuf Hawkins is killed in the predominantly Italian Brooklyn neighborhood of Bensonhurst when he and three friends are assaulted by about thirty white men (August 23).

Time Line of African American History

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1091

Year

Event

1989

Douglas Wilder is the first African American to be elected a state governor—in Virginia—in U.S. history (November 7).

1990

Milwaukee, Wisconsin, school board votes to open two schools for blacks utilizing a special curriculum focusing on black culture and featuring programs designed to develop self-esteem and personal responsibility.

1990

President George Bush vetoes the Civil Rights Act, which would have overturned five recent Supreme Court rulings making it more difficult to win discrimination lawsuits against employers.

1990

Under a new law, the Justice Department begins collecting statistics on hate crimes in order to determine if changes in federal law are needed.

1990

Black activists boycott Korean American supermarkets in Brooklyn following charges that a black customer had been assaulted in one of the stores.

1991

President George Bush signs the Civil Rights Bill, making it easier for employees to sue employers for discrimination, but only after changes are made to a vetoed 1990 bill that might have created racial quotas.

1991

Clarence Thomas succeeds Thurgood Marshall as the second black Supreme Court justice, despite protests from civil rights groups decrying his opposition to affirmative action programs and busing for school desegregation.

1991

National Civil Rights Museum, dedicated to the 1950’s and 1960’s struggle for racial equality in the United States, is opened in Memphis, Tennessee.

1991

Studies by the Urban Institute find that hiring and housing discrimination against blacks is “widespread and entrenched.”

1991

Killing of a young Guyanese immigrant by a Jewish driver leads to the retaliatory murder of an Australian scholar by black youths and prompts four days of rioting in Brooklyn’s Crown Heights neighborhood.

1092

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Time Line of African American History

Year

Event

1991

Los Angeles police officers beat Rodney King after stopping him for a driving violation in an incident caught on videotape by a bystander (March 3).

1991

Supreme Court’s decision in Powers v. Ohio holds that prosecutors cannot use peremptory challenges to exclude African Americans from criminal trial juries (April 1).

1991

Supreme Court’s decision in Edmonson v. Leesville Concrete Company extends an earlier ruling to rule that potential jurors may not be peremptorily excluded from civil trials on the basis of their race (June 3).

1991

Congress passes the Civil Rights Act of 1991, which outlaws employment discrimination (November 21).

1992

U.S. Department of Education determines that the admissions policy of the University of California at Berkeley’s law school violates the Civil Rights Act of 1964 by comparing prospective candidates only against others in their own racial group.

1992

In United States v. Fordice, the Supreme Court rules that remnants of segregation remain in the Mississippi system of higher education and that positive steps must be taken to remedy such segregation.

1992

Four Los Angeles police officers are acquitted of charges stemming from the 1991 beating of Rodney King, touching off five days of rioting in Los Angeles that result in more than fifty deaths and $1 billion in property damage (April 29).

1992

In R.A.V. v. City of St. Paul, the Supreme Court unanimously rules that a St. Paul, Minnesota, law making the use of racist language a criminal offense is a violation of First Amendment guarantees of free speech (June 22).

1993

Los Angeles police officers Stacey Koon and Laurence Powell are sentenced to prison for violating the civil rights of Rodney King in a 1991 beating incident.

1993

In Wisconsin v. Mitchell, the Supreme Court rules that states can punish racially motivated crimes more harshly than similar crimes not motivated by bias (June 11).

Time Line of African American History

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1093

Year

Event

1994

Seventy-three-year-old white supremacist Byron De La Beckwith is convicted of the 1963 murder of civil rights leader Medgar Evers and is sentenced to life in prison.

1994

Flagstar Company agrees to pay $45.7 million in a classaction settlement stemming from 4,300 racial bias complaints against its Denny’s restaurant chain.

1994

Federal jury orders the city of Los Angeles to pay Rodney King $3.8 million in damages stemming from his 1991 beating by white police officers.

1995

Delegates to the annual convention of Southern Baptists, the nation’s largest Protestant denomination, pass a resolution denouncing racism and apologizing for “historic acts of evil such as slavery.”

1995

Supreme Court’s Adarand Constructors v. Peña decision requires that in federal contracts based on affirmative action, set-asides are valid only when those benefiting have suffered actual discrimination in the past.

1995

Maryland Democratic representative Kweisi Mfume becomes chief executive of the NAACP following longstanding controversies over improper financial practices of former directors William F. Gibson, Benjamin Chavis, and Benjamin L. Hooks.

1995

O. J. Simpson’s acquittal of the 1994 murder of his wife and a companion divides the country along racial lines (October 3).

1995

Approximately 700,000 people, mostly African American men, attend Louis Farrakhan’s Million Man March, a Washington, D.C., rally highlighting male family responsibilities and addressing problems plaguing the black community in America (October 16).

1996

California voters approve Proposition 209, designed to end all forms of affirmative action in “the operation of public employment, public education, or public contracting.”

1996

Wave of church burnings begins sweeping the South.

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Time Line of African American History

Year

Event

1996

U.S. Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals rules, in Hopwood v. Texas, that the University of Texas Law School may not consider race as a factor in its admissions process.

1996

President Bill Clinton signs the Church Arson Prevention Act, making destruction of religious property “on the basis of race, color, or ethnicity” a federal crime.

1996

Texaco Incorporated agrees to pay $176.1 million to settle a discrimination suit filed on behalf of 1,500 current and former black employees.

1996

Oakland, California, school board determines that the English dialect spoken by many African Americans is a separate language (Ebonics) based upon West African roots, thus qualifying for federal funds approved for bilingual education.

1997

National Church Arson Task Force, appointed by President Clinton in 1996, reports that racism was only one of many factors contributing to more than four hundred church fires that had been set during the 1990’s.

1997

President Bill Clinton launches a year-long debate on race relations in America by appointing black historian John Hope Franklin to lead a panel consisting of three whites, two blacks, one Hispanic, and one Korean American.

1997

Winnie Madikizela-Mandela speaks at the Million Woman March, a Philadelphia rally organized to unify African American women against common community and family problems (October 25).

1999

Mistaken killing of an African immigrant by New York City police provokes public outrage.

1999

African American farmers win a lawsuit against the U.S. Department of Agriculture for discriminating against them in awarding loans in the past.

2000

Coca-Cola Company agrees to pay $192.5 million to settle a discrimination suit filed on behalf of an estimated 2,000 black employees.

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Year

Event

2000

South Carolina’s legislature votes to remove the Confederate flag from the statehouse in response to protests and boycotting efforts launched by the NAACP.

2001

Newly elected president George W. Bush makes Colin Powell the first African American secretary of state.

2002

Slavery Reparations Coordinating Committee reveals plans to sue corporations that have profited from slavery.

2003

Supreme Court’s Grutter v. Bollinger decision holds that race can be used as a standard in school admissions.

2004

Kweisi Mfume resigns as chief executive officer of the NAACP.

2004

U.S. Justice Department announces that it is reopening its investigation into the 1955 murder of Emmett Till in Mississippi.

2005

Total African American population is about 36 million people.

2005

Condolezza Rice succeeds Colin Powell as U.S. secretary of state and becomes the first African American woman to hold that post.

John Powell and the Editors

Notable Figures in African American History Abernathy, Ralph David (1926-1990): Christian minister and civil rights activist. Abernathy was a close friend of Martin Luther King, Jr., when both took Baptist pastorates in Montgomery, Alabama, around 1951. He helped to coordinate the Montgomery bus boycott in 1955 and to organize the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) in 1957. After King’s assassination, he became president of the SCLC (1968-1977). In 1977, he ran unsuccessfully for Congress. The year before he died, he published a controversial autobiography, And the Walls Came Tumbling Down (1989), which included details of King’s extramarital affairs. Ali, Muhammad (1942): Professional boxing champion. Born Cassius Marcellus Clay, Jr., Ali started boxing at an early age in Louisville, Kentucky, and won an Olympic gold medal as a light-heavyweight in 1960. In 1964, he converted to the Black Muslim religion and changed his name from Clay to Ali. He won the world heavyweight boxing championship four times (1964, 1967, 1974, 1978). He was stripped of his title when he refused induction into the U.S. Army in 1967, but the U.S. Supreme Court reversed the draft evasion conviction in 1971. Ali became a symbol of black pride during the 1960’s and remained an icon into the twenty-first century. Allen, Richard (1760-1831): Founder of the African Methodist Episcopal Church. After gaining his freedom from slavery when he was twenty-one, Allen became the first African American ordained by the Methodist Society but was denied the right to worship at a predominantly white church in Philadelphia, so he founded his own church, which was later granted legal independence from the white church. In 1830, Allen led the first meeting of what would become the Negro Convention Movement. Anderson, Marian (1897-1993): Contralto. Raised in Philadelphia, Anderson studied music from an early age and earned an international reputation while performing throughout Europe during the 1930’s. On her return to the United States, her

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stature was immense; however, she became the focus of an embarrassing incident in 1939, when the Daughters of the American Revolution refused her permission to sing in Philadelphia’s Constitution Hall because she was black. When first Lady Eleanor Roosevelt learned of the matter, she arranged for Anderson to perform on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D.C. The incident immortalized Anderson as a symbol of African American oppression. Anderson continued performing until 1965 and earned a long list of distinctions. Angelou, Maya (1928): Novelist, poet. Born Marguerite Johnson, Angelou worked as a nightclub singer in New York and San Francisco, as an editor for the English-language Arab Observer in Cairo, Egypt, and as a teacher of music and drama in Ghana. She became a national figure with the publication of the first volume of her autobiography, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings (1970), which detailed her experiences with southern racism and sexual abuse. She was nominated for an Emmy Award for her performance as Nyo Boto in the television series Roots (1977). In 1993, she was invited to read her poem “On the Pulse of Morning” at the inauguration of President Bill Clinton. Asante, Molefi Kete (1942): Scholar. Born Arthur Lee Smith, Jr., he legally changed his name in 1975. After receiving a doctoral degree in communications from the University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA) in 1968, he taught at Purdue, UCLA, the State University of New York, Howard University, and Temple University and was named director of the Center for Afro-American Studies at UCLA. His more than two dozen books include Afrocentricity: The Theory of Social Change (1980), African Culture: The Rhythms of Unity (1985), and The Historical and Cultural Atlas of African-Americans (1991). He was also a founding editor of the Journal of Black Studies. Baker, Josephine (1903-1986): Civil rights activist. After graduating as valedictorian with a bachelor’s degree from Shaw Boarding School in 1927, she moved to New York City, where she became deeply involved with progressive politics. In 1931, she became director of the Young Negroes Cooperative League, which provided reasonably priced food to its members during the Depression. She also worked with the literacy

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program of the Works Progress Administration. During the 1940’s, she set up and directed branch offices of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. She moved to Atlanta, Georgia, to work with the Southern Christian Leadership Conference in 1958 and was an unofficial adviser to the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee during the 1960’s. She also helped organize the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party and raised money for freedom fighters in Rhodesia (Zimbabwe) and South Africa. (Not to be confused with the singer Josephine Baker, 1903-1975). Baldwin, James Arthur (1924-1987): Author and playwright. Baldwin has often been praised for his ability to make readers feel the destructive power of racial prejudice on both black and white people. His books include two autobiographical works, Notes of a Native Son (1955) and Nobody Knows My Name (1961); several powerful novels, including Go Tell It on the Mountain (1953), Another Country (1962), and Just Above My Head (1979); and a number of plays, including Blues for Mister Charlie (1964) and The Amen Corner (1964). He spent the final years of his life in France, where he was made commander of the Legion of Honor, France’s highest civilian honor. Baraka, Amiri (1934): Poet and playwright. Born LeRoi Jones, Baraka founded Yugen magazine and Totem Press in 1958 and the Black Arts Repertory Theater in 1964. He achieved fame with his honest treatment of racism in plays such as Dutchman (1964), The Slave (1966), and Four Revolutionary Plays (1968). He was also a leading spokesperson for the Black Power movement in Newark, New Jersey, where he headed the activist Temple of Kawaida. In 1972, he chaired the National Black Political Convention. Bethune, Mary McLeod (1875-1955): Educator. After teaching at various schools in Georgia and Florida, Bethune founded the Daytona Educational and Industrial School for Negro Girls in 1904 and McLeod Hospital in 1911. In 1922, her Daytona school merged with the Cookman Institute to become Bethune-Cookman College, of which she served as president until 1942. During the 1920’s, she served on conferences under Herbert Hoover. She also served as director of the Division of Negro Affairs of the National Youth Administration (1936-

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1944), was special assistant to the secretary of war during World War II, and was a special adviser on minority affairs to President Franklin D. Roosevelt (1935-1944). Bethune also played important roles in the National Urban League, National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, and the National Council of Negro Women. Bond, Julian (1940): Georgia politician and civil rights activist. A student founder of the Committee on Appeal for Human Rights, Bond attracted the attention of Martin Luther King, Jr., and helped found the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, of which he was the first director of communications (1961-1966). A Democrat, he was elected to the Georgia house of representatives (1965-1975) and the Georgia senate (1975-1987). He helped found the Southern Poverty Law Center in 1971, served as president of the Atlanta branch of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP; 1974-1989), and became chairman of the NAACP in 1998. Bond also hosted the television program America’s Black Forum and narrated the Public Broadcasting Service civil rights series Eyes on the Prize. Bradley, Thomas (1917-1998): California politician. Bradley held various positions with the Los Angeles Police Department from 1940 to 1961 and earned a law degree in the 1950’s. In 1963, he became the first African American elected to the Los Angeles City Council and was also the first African American elected the city’s mayor in 1973, despite the fact that African Americans constituted a small minority of the city’s voters. While serving four terms as mayor, he also ran for governor of California twice (1982, 1986). Bradley also was a founding member of the Black Achievers Committee of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. Braun, Carol Moseley (1947): Illinois politician. Braun was an assistant U.S. attorney for the northern district of Illinois (1973-1977) and served as an Illinois state representative (1979-1987), in which position she established a reputation as an ardent supporter of civil rights legislation. After serving as Cook County recorder of deeds (1987-1993), she became the first African American woman to be elected to the U.S. Senate, in which she served one term (1993-1999).

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Brooke, Edward W. (1919): Massachusetts politician and former state attorney general who, in 1966, became the first African American elected to a full term in the U.S. Senate since Reconstruction. A liberal Democrat, Brooke was reelected in 1972. After losing his bid for a third term in 1978, he returned to practicing law and became a lobbyist in Washington, D.C. Brown, H. Rap (1943): Civil rights activist. Brown became leader of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee in 1967. The following year he was charged with inciting a riot in Cambridge, Maryland, and was convicted of carrying a gun across state lines. In 1969, he published Die Nigger Die (1969) while serving a prison term for a robbery conviction. After converting to Islam, he changed his name to Jamil Abdullah Al-Amin and became the leader of Community Mosque in Atlanta, Georgia. Brown, John (1800-1859): White abolitionist. Brown joined antislavery forces in Kansas in 1855 and murdered five proslavery advocates in 1856 in retaliation for a previous massacre. After establishing a plan for a slave refuge state, he led a band that seized the federal arsenal at Harpers Ferry, Virginia, in 1859, hoping to incite a slave insurrection. Convicted of treason and hanged, he later became an icon of the abolitionist movement. Bruce, Blanche Kelso (1841-1898): Mississippi politician. Born a slave, Bruce built a fortune as a plantation owner after the Civil War and served in various local and state positions in Mississippi during Reconstruction. He was a U.S. senator from Mississippi (1875-1881), and became the first African American to serve a full term in the Senate. He was also a staunch defender of black, Chinese, and American Indian rights. After Reconstruction, he worked with the U.S. register of the treasury (1881-1889, 1895-1898) and as recorder of deeds for the District of Columbia (1889-1895). Bunche, Ralph (1904-1971): Diplomat and scholar. A former head of the political science department of Howard University, Bunche served as senior social analyst for the Office of the Coordinator of Information in African and Far Eastern Affairs and with the African section of the Office of Strategic Services during World War II. Recognized as an expert on colonial af-

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fairs, he joined the U.S. State Department in 1944 and served as delegate or adviser to nine international conferences over the next four years. After serving as chief assistant on the United Nations Palestine Commission, he became the first African American to receive the Nobel Peace Prize in 1950, for his role in the Arab-Israeli cease-fire of 1948-1949. Bunche also served as U.N. undersecretary of Special Political Affairs (1957-1967) and undersecretary general of the United Nations (1968-1971). Carmichael, Stokely (1941-1998): Trinidad-born political activist. After attending Howard University, Carmichael became an accomplished organizer for the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) of which he was elected chair in 1966. He popularized the phrase “black power” and became known for radical positions that led to his expulsion from SNCC in 1968. He joined the Black Panther Party in 1968, but resigned the following year and moved to Guinea in West Africa, where he became a supporter of Pan-Africanism. In 1978, he changed his name to Kwame Toure, in honor of the West African nationalist leaders Sékou Touré and Kwame Nkrumah. Chavis, Benjamin (1948): Civil rights activist. After training as a theologian, Chavis became a civil rights organizer for the Southern Christian Leadership Conference and the United Church of Christ. In 1971, he was indicted as one of the Wilmington Ten for the firebombing of a store in Wilmington, Delaware. He was convicted but was granted parole, and his conviction was reversed in 1980. Five years later, he was appointed executive director of the Commission for Racial Justice, and he served as executive director of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (1993-1994)—a position from which he was forced to resign because of a financial scandal. In 1995, he served as national director of the Million Man March. Chisholm, Shirley (1924-2005): New York Democratic politician. After an early career in child care and education, Chisholm was elected New York State assemblywoman in 1964. In 1969, she became the first African American woman elected to the U.S. House of Representatives, where she served until 1983. She also cofounded the National Political Congress of Black Women. Her autobiography is titled Unbossed and Unbought (1970).

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Cleaver, Eldridge (1935-1998): Civil rights activist. After serving a prison sentence from 1958 to 1966, Cleaver joined the Black Panther Party and became one of the most vocal proponents of the doctrine of black power. His memoir Soul on Ice (1968) became one of the most powerful statements of that movement. After becoming involved in a 1968 shooting, Cleaver fled to Algeria. He returned to the United States in 1975 and espoused more conservative views. Cone, James (1938): Theologian. A faculty member at Union Theological Seminary since 1969, Cone provided a systematic case for divine support of the black liberation struggle in the United States and elsewhere. His many books include Black Theology and Black Power (1969), For My People: Black Theology and the Black Church (1984), and Martin and Malcolm and America: A Dream or a Nightmare? (1991). Cosby, Bill (1937): Actor and comedian. By the mid-1960’s, Cosby was playing top nightclubs with his comedy routine and regularly appearing on television. In 1965, he became the first African American star of a prime-time television series, I Spy, for which he won Emmy Awards (1965-1968). Throughout the 1970’s, he appeared in films and television shows and in Las Vegas, Reno, and Tahoe nightclubs. His television sitcom The Cosby Show (1985-1992) presented upper-middle-class black family life to mainstream American audiences and was the top-rated show of its time. Cosby also earned five Grammy Awards and wrote Fatherhood (1986) and Time Flies (1987). A quiet but forceful advocate of African American education, Cosby donated twenty million dollars to Spellman College in 1988. In 2004, Cosby received national attention for his outspoken criticisms of the values and parenting skills of many lowincome African Americans, whom he accused of neglecting their responsibilities as parents by raising their children to think of themselves as victims of racism. Crummell, Alexander (1819-1898): Christian minister and author. After earning a degree at Cambridge University in England, Crummell served as professor of mental and moral science at the College of Liberia (1853-1873) in West Africa and was minister of St. Luke’s Protestant Episcopal Church in Washington, D.C. (1876-1898). In 1897, he helped found the

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American Negro Academy. His many books include Future of Africa (1862) and Africa and America (1892). Davis, Angela (1944): Political activist and scholar. After an extensive education at Brandeis University, the Sorbonne, and the University of Frankfurt, Davis took a teaching job at the University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA). In 1969, she joined the Communist Party. She later became involved with the Black Panther Party. After being implicated in a courtroom shooting in 1970, she went underground but eventually was arrested. However, she was acquitted on all charges in 1972. She later became cochair of the National Alliance Against Racism and Political Repression. Her books include If They Come in the Morning (1971), Women, Race, and Class (1983), and Women, Culture, and Politics (1989). Davis, Benjamin O., Jr. (1912-2002): Career military officer. The son of Brigadier General Benjamin Davis, Sr., the younger Davis became the second African American general in the U.S. military and the first in the U.S. Air Force in 1954. During World War II, he was a decorated pilot and squadron commander of the Tuskegee Airmen. In 1965, President Lyndon B. Johnson promoted him to the rank of lieutenant general, in which capacity he served as chief of staff of U.S. forces in Korea. Davis, Benjamin O., Sr. (1877-1970): Career army officer. Davis served in the Spanish-American War and in the all-black Ninth Cavalry. In 1940, he became the first African American to reach the rank of general in the regular army, when President Franklin D. Roosevelt promoted him to brigadier general. Davis retired from military service in 1948. Delany, Martin Robison (1812-1885): Doctor, author, and abolitionist. Born a slave in what later became West Virginia, Delany fled north when his masters discovered that he could read. He edited the abolitionist newspapers The Mystery and The North Star. Disappointed with the treatment of blacks in the United States, he recommended founding an African American colony in Africa or South America. In 1863, he was commissioned the first black major in the U.S. Army. He later published Principal of Ethnology: The Origin of Races and Color (1879). Douglass, Frederick (c. 1817-1895): Abolitionist and journalist. The most prominent African American of his time, Douglass

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escaped from slavery in 1838 and fled north. A brilliant orator, he became famous as an agent of the Massachusetts AntiSlavery Society during the 1840’s. After publishing Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass (1845), he lectured in England and Ireland (1845-1847), earning enough money to purchase his freedom, thereby ending status as a fugitive slave. Douglass founded and served as coeditor of The North Star, 1847-1860 (Frederick Douglass’s Paper from 1851) and came to oppose the radical abolitionism of William Lloyd Garrison and John Brown. After the Civil War, he held several federal government positions. He was U.S. marshal for the District of Columbia (1877-1881); recorder of deeds for the District of Columbia (1881-1886), and U.S. minister to Haiti (1889-1891). Du Bois, W. E. B. (1868-1963): Civil rights activist, scholar, and author. The leader of the Niagara Movement (1905-1909), Du Bois helped found the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) in 1909 and acted as the association’s director of publications and editor of The Crisis (1909-1934). He was also a professor of sociology at Atlanta University (1932-1944) and served as head of the special research department of the NAACP (1944-1948). Dissatisfied with the pace of social change in the United States, he joined the Communist Party and emigrated to Ghana in West Africa in 1961 to become editor in chief of the Pan-Africanist Encyclopedia Africana, sponsored by Ghanaian president Kwame Nkrumah. His numerous books include The Souls of Black Folk (1903), The Negro (1915), The Gift of Black Folk (1924), Color and Democracy (1945), The World and Africa (1947), and the Black Flame trilogy (1957-1961). Eisenhower, Dwight D. (1890-1969): Thirty-fourth president of the United States (1953-1961). A moderate Republican, Eisenhower appointed California governor Earl Warren chief justice of the United States during his first year in office. He expected Warren to behave as a political conservative and was consequently surprised by Warren’s social activism, especially after Warren guided the Court to a unanimous ruling in the Brown v. Board of Education case in 1954. During the Little Rock crisis three years later, Eisenhower reluctantly sent federal troops into Arkansas to enforce school desegregation. During that

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same year, 1957, he appointed the federal Civil Rights Commission, which was required by the Civil Rights Act of 1957. Evers, Medgar (1925-1963): Civil rights activist. Appointed Mississippi field secretary of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People in 1954, Evers fought for enforcement of school integration and advocated the right of African Americans to vote and the boycotting of merchants who discriminated against them. His murder in 1963 made him one of the first martyrs of the Civil Rights movement. Farmer, James (1920-1999): Civil rights leader. One of the organizers of the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), in 1942, Farmer arranged the first successful sit-in demonstration, at a Chicago restaurant the following year. He later also served as program director of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (1959-1961), and he introduced the tactic of the Freedom Ride in 1961 to test principles of desegregation. Farmer left CORE in 1966 and was appointed assistant secretary of Health, Education, and Welfare in 1969. In 1976, he became associate director of the Coalition of American Public Employees. Farrakhan, Louis (1933): Muslim cleric. Born Louis Eugene Walcott, Farrakhan joined the Nation of Islam during the 1950’s. He denounced Malcolm X after the latter’s split with Elijah Muhammad and succeeded Malcolm as leader of New York’s Harlem mosque. Farrakhan left the Nation of Islam after it began accepting white members during the mid-1970’s and founded a rival organization that was later known by the same name. In 1984, he supported Jesse Jackson in the presidential campaign, marking a turning point in Black Muslim political involvement. In 1995, he and Benjamin Chavis organized the Million Man March. Forten, James (1766-1842): Abolitionist and entrepreneur. Born of free parents in Philadelphia, Forten served aboard a privateer during the American Revolution, during which he was captured and held prisoner for seven months. While he was in England, he became acquainted with abolitionist philosophy. By 1798, he owned a prosperous maritime company. He became active in the abolitionist movement during the 1830’s and joined the American Anti-Slavery Society. He also helped raise

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funds for William Lloyd Garrison’s newspaper The Liberator and founded the American Moral Reform Society. Fortune, T. Thomas (1856-1928): Journalist and editor. Fortune worked in various positions for the New York Sun during the late 1870’s and early 1880’s. In 1883, he founded the New York Age, which became the leading black journal of opinion in the United States. Fortune crusaded against school segregation and joined Booker T. Washington in organizing the National Negro Business League in 1900. Fortune coined the term “Afro-American” as a substitute for “Negro” in the New York press. Gandhi, Mohandas K. (1869-1948): Indian nationalist leader who had an indirect but strong influence on the American Civil Rights movement. After going to South Africa to practice law, Gandhi became a leader of the Indian civil rights struggle in Natal. While there, he developed the philosophy of nonviolent direct action to force political change that he later introduced to the independence struggle in his native India. Gandhi’s philosophy was a powerful influence on the nonviolent strategies of the American Civil Rights movement, and it particularly influenced the philosophy of Martin Luther King, Jr. Garrison, William Lloyd (1805-1879): Abolitionist who published The Liberator from 1831 to 1865. He founded the American Anti-Slavery Society in 1833 and was its president from 1843 to 1865. Garrison opposed the Compromise of 1850 and encouraged the separation of the northern and southern states. After the Civil War, he campaigned against mistreatment of Native Americans and in favor of women’s suffrage. Garvey, Marcus (1887-1940): Jamaican-born black nationalist leader. Two years after founding the Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA) in 1914, Garvey came to the United States, where he founded UNIA branches in cities throughout the northern states. At UNIA’s first convention in New York City in 1920, he outlined a plan for the establishment of an African nation-state for American blacks. He preached racial pride through civil rights and economic selfsufficiency. After being convicted of fraud in 1925, he was sent to a federal prison, but his sentence was commuted by President Calvin Coolidge, and he was deported back to Jamaica in

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1927. He continued to be active in progressive politics but his influence on developments in the United States waned greatly. Gordy, Berry, Jr. (1929): Songwriter and music producer. Gordy served with the U.S. Army in the Korean War. After a number of failed or unsatisfying jobs in Detroit, Michigan, he began writing hit songs with the help of his sister Gwen Gordy and Billy Davis. In 1959, he formed Motown Record Corporation and a number of related businesses. By the mid-1960’s, Gordy had brought black soul music to mainstream American audiences with highly polished performances by artists such as the Supremes, Smokey Robinson, the Four Tops, the Marvelettes, Marvin Gaye, the Jackson Five, Lionel Richie, and Stevie Wonder. He was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1988. Grace, Charles Emmanuel “Sweet Daddy” (1881-1960): Religious leader. Born Marcelino Manoel de Graca in the Cape Verde Islands, Grace established the United House of Prayer for All People during the early 1920’s. His ministerial style was rooted in faith healing and speaking in tongues. Products such as “Daddy Grace” coffee, tea, and creams were believed to have healing powers. By 1960, Grace’s church claimed 25,000 adherents in 375 congregations. Graves, Earl (1935): Publisher and editor. Graves served in the U.S. Army as an officer in the Green Berets (1957-1960) and was an administrative assistant to Robert F. Kennedy (19641968). In 1970, he launched Black Enterprise to provide African Americans with practical help for succeeding in business. By the late 1990’s, the magazine had a subscription base of more than 300,000. Graves also wrote How to Succeed in Business Without Being White (1997). Haley, Alex (1921-1992): Journalist and author. Haley got into journalism while serving in the U.S. Coast Guard (1952-1959). He later interviewed Malcolm X for Playboy magazine—an assignment that led to his first book, The Autobiography of Malcolm X (1965). He then spent a dozen years researching his family history, leading to publication of the novel Roots (1976), based on the life of a West African man named Kunta Kinte who was sent to North America in slavery. Haley’s book led to a twelve-hour television series, hundreds of interviews and articles, instruc-

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tional packets and tapes, and sparked intense interest in genealogy and history among both black and white Americans. Hamer, Fannie Lou (1917-1977): Civil rights activist. After forty years of working on the same plantation, Hamer lost her job when she tried to vote. She then began working with the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. She helped register black voters and helped form the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party, for which she spoke eloquently in favor of seating black delegates to the Democratic National Convention in 1964. Hamer herself became one of the first delegates to the Democratic convention in 1968. She founded Freedom Farms Corporation in 1969 and toured and spoke widely on behalf of civil rights legislation. Hayes, Rutherford B. (1822-1893): Nineteenth president of the United States (1877-1881). Though an ardent Radical Republican early in the Reconstruction era, Hayes moderated his views and as president ended that era by withdrawing military support for Republican state governments in the South. The end of Reconstruction left African Americans in the South at the mercy of resentful white politicians, who enacted discriminatory legislation and effectively disfranchised black voters. Hill, Anita (1956): Professor of law. Hill was a relatively unknown instructor at the University of Oklahoma when she gained national attention during Senate confirmation hearings for U.S. Supreme Court justice nominee Clarence Thomas in 1991. At that time, she charged that she had been sexually harassed when working for Thomas at the Equal Employment Opportunities Commission in the early 1980’s. Afterward, she withstood attempts by some lawmakers to have the University of Oklahoma Law School fire her and spoke widely around the country throughout the 1990’s in favor of civil rights and women’s rights. Hooks, Benjamin (1925): Lawyer, preacher, and civil rights leader. Hooks was the first African American to serve as a judge in a criminal court in Tennessee’s Shelby County. He also served as executive director of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (1977-1992). In that capacity, he vigorously promoted integration, pro-African foreign policy, and progressive employment legislation.

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Howard, Oliver Otis (1830-1909): U.S. Army officer. Howard entered the Army in 1854 and fought in the Civil War, during which he was promoted to brigadier general in 1861. After the war, he served as a commissioner for the Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen, and Abandoned Lands (1865-1874) and as founder and first president of Howard University (1869-1874). After returning to the Army, he commanded the federal campaign against Chief Joseph of the Nez Perce Indians in the Northwest in 1877 and was superintendent at West Point (1881-1882). Howard was considered one of the few “humanitarian” generals who campaigned on behalf of Indian rights. Hughes, Langston (1902-1967): Writer and poet. After dropping out of Columbia University, Hughes wrote poetry and worked as a cabin boy on a freighter, on which he sailed to Africa. He was later a major figure in the 1920’s Harlem Renaissance. His essay “The Negro Writer and the Racial Mountain” (1926) established an early ethic of black pride. He wrote in many fields, including poetry (The Weary Blues, 1926; Fine Clothes to the Jew, 1927; Shakespeare in Harlem, 1942; Montage of a Dream Deferred, 1951); librettos (Street Scene, 1947); plays (Mulatto, 1935); and autobiography (The Big Sea, 1940; I Wonder as I Wander, 1956). Innis, Roy (1934): Civil rights leader. Innis joined the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) in 1963 and became its national director in 1968. He also founded the Harlem Commonwealth Council, which was designed to promote black businesses. Controversy over his involvement in recruiting black Vietnam War veterans to fight in Angola’s civil war and charges that he misappropriated funds led to important defections from CORE, which became largely inactive in the 1980’s. Jackson, Jesse (1941): Civil rights activist, Baptist minister, and politician. Jackson joined the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) in 1965 and served as the executive director of its Operation Breadbasket program (1967-1971). He also founded Operation PUSH (People United to Save Humanity) in 1971. His PUSH-EXCEL program for encouraging young students to improve academically received funding from the administration of U.S. president Jimmy Carter. Jackson campaigned for the Democratic nomination for president

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of the United States in 1984 and 1988. In the latter campaign, he finished a strong second to Michael Dukakis, who lost to George Bush in the November election. His candidacy demonstrated the possibility of an African American eventually being elected president. Afterward, he continued to press for child care, health care reform, housing reform, and statehood for the predominantly African American District of Columbia. Johnson, Andrew (1808-1875): Seventeenth president of the United States. A Tennessee politician, Johnson became one of the rare southerners in the Union government when he was elected vice president in 1864. Abraham Lincoln’s assassination shortly after the conclusion of the Civil War suddenly elevated Johnson to the presidency and gave him responsibility for overseeing the postwar reconstruction of the South. However, his inclination to be lenient toward the South pitted him against the Congress, which was dominated by Radical Republicans who subjected him to impeachment and wrested away control of Reconstruction policy. Johnson narrowly survived his impeachment trial and eventually left office under a cloud. However, he later enjoyed some vindication when he was reelected to the Senate. Johnson, Jack (1878-1946): Boxer. The first black heavyweight boxing champion of the world (1908-1915), Jackson became the center of racial controversy as the public called for Jim Jeffries, the white former champion, to come out of retirement to defeat him. Johnson beat Jeffries in 1910 but remained a target of racist attacks through the rest of his life, which Howard Sackler later dramatized in a play, The Great White Hope (1967). Johnson, James Weldon (1871-1938): Poet, diplomat, and civil rights leader. As a young man, Johnson was known principally as a lyricist for popular songs, including “Lift Every Voice and Sing” (1899). He later served as U.S. consul in Puerto Cabello, Venezuela (1906-1909), and in Corinto, Nicaragua (1909-1912). From 1920 to 1930, he was executive secretary of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (1920-1930). Johnson’s many books include The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man (1912), The Book of American Negro Poetry (1922), God’s Trombones (1927), and Negro Americans, What Now (1934).

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Johnson, John H. (1918): Publisher who addressed the need for mainstream black publications with the establishment of The Negro Digest (1942) and Ebony (1945). Johnson was also a member of the advisory council of the Harvard Graduate School of Business and a director of the Chamber of Commerce of the United States. Johnson, Lyndon B. (1908-1973): Thirty-sixth president of the United States (1963-1969). A native Texan, Johnson began his political career as state administrator and served in the National Youth Administration (1935-1937). In 1936, he was elected to the House of Representatives as a Democrat. In 1949, he moved from the House to the Senate, in which he became majority leader in 1955-1961. After attempting to win the Democratic nomination for president in 1960, he joined the Democratic ticket under John F. Kennedy and was elected vice president. On Kennedy’s assassination in 1963, Johnson became president. Despite his conservative southern background, he became a champion of progressive social programs and articulated what he called the “Great Society.” Under his leadership, Congress passed the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965, which were designed to ensure that African Americans received their full civil rights. Johnson also established the Department of Housing and Urban Development and made Thurgood Marshall the first black Supreme Court justice in 1967. Jones, Absalom (1746-1818): Protestant cleric. In 1794, Jones became the first leader of St. Thomas African Episcopal Church. One year later, he was ordained the first African American Protestant Episcopal priest in the United States. Jordan, Vernon (1935): Lawyer and civil rights leader. Jordan was field secretary for the Georgia branch of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (1962-1964). He also served as director of the Voter Education Project of the Southern Regional Council (1964-1968), was executive director of the United Negro College Fund (1970-1972), and executive director of the National Urban League (1972-1981). In 1992, Jordan became a political confidante of President Bill Clinton. Kennedy, John F. (1917-1963): Thirty-fifth president of the United States (1961-1963). After graduating from Harvard in 1940,

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Kennedy served as a naval officer during World War II. A Democrat, he was elected a Massachusetts representative to Congress in 1947. After three terms in the House of Representatives (1947-1953), he was elected to the Senate (1953-1960). In 1960, he became the first Roman Catholic elected president of the United States. As president, he established the Peace Corps and the Alliance for Progress in Latin America. An outspoken advocate of civil rights for African Americans, he federalized the Alabama national guard to ensure integration of the state’s schools in 1963. His efforts to persuade Congress to pass major civil rights legislation were interrupted by his assassination in late 1963, but his goal was realized by his successor, Lyndon B. Johnson. Kennedy, Robert F. (1925-1968): Politician and lawyer. In 1960, Kennedy managed the presidential campaign of his brother, John F. Kennedy, who made him attorney general of the United States (1961-1964). In that capacity, he was an ardent supporter of civil rights. In 1964, he was elected to the U.S. Senate from his adopted state of New York. He continued to champion civil rights and was mounting a serious challenge for the Democratic nomination for the presidency in 1968 until he was assassinated the same night that he won the California primary. Kennedy’s books include The Enemy Within (1960), Just Friends and Brave Enemies (1962), and To Seek a Newer World (1967). King, Martin Luther, Jr. (1929-1968): Civil rights activist and Baptist minister. King earned a doctoral degree from Crozer Theological Seminary in Rochester, New York, in 1955. Afterward, he accepted the pastorate of the Dexter Avenue Baptist Church in Montgomery, Alabama. In 1956, he helped organize the Montgomery bus boycott, which led to the founding of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, of which he served as first president. Meanwhile, he was also a copastor of Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta (1960-1968). Through the remainder of his life, he was acknowledged as the primary leader of the Civil Rights movement and personally directed many of its campaigns. Some of these led to his arrest. While serving a jail sentence in Birmingham, Alabama, where he was arrested while protesting segregation and unfair hiring practices in 1963, he wrote his classic “Letter from Birmingham

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Jail.” That same year, he delivered his “I Have a Dream” speech during the historic March on Washington. Time magazine named him “Man of the Year” in 1963; the following year, he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. Around that same time, he began to speak out forcefully against the Vietnam War and urban poverty, causing many black leaders to question his tactics in the civil rights struggle. He was assassinated in Memphis, Tennessee, in 1968. His January birthday was later made a federal holiday. King, Rodney (1966): California motorist who was severely beaten by Los Angeles police officers in 1991. Caught on a videotape made by a bystander and broadcast nationwide, his beating became a cause célèbre and the focus of a criminal trial of the four officers charged with beating him. After a predominantly white jury acquitted the officers in April, 1992, Los Angeles erupted in riots that killed fifty-eight people and caused $1 billion in property damage. Lee, Spike (1957): Filmmaker. While attending New York University’s Institute of Film and Television, Lee won the Student Award presented by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences for Joe’s Bed-Sty Barbershop: We Cut Heads (1982). His controversial films, highlighting past and present struggles of African Americans in a land of alien values, include She’s Gotta Have It (1986), Do the Right Thing (1989), Mo’ Better Blues (1990), Malcolm X (1992), and He Got Game (1998). Lincoln, Abraham (1809-1865): Sixteenth president of the United States (1861-1865). After a boyhood on pioneer farms in the Midwest, Lincoln was elected to the Illinois state legislature in 1834. While representing Illinois in the House of Representatives (1847-1849), he spoke out against the Mexican War. In 1858, he was defeated in his bid for a seat in the U.S. Senate but established his position against slavery during his famous debates with Stephen A. Douglas during the campaign. In 1860, his election as president of the United States accelerated the movement toward secession by southern states that led to the Civil War, which dominated his presidency. Because of his dedication to preserving the Union, his attitude toward abolishing slavery was equivocal. Nevertheless, he is remembered as the “Great Emancipator” because of his issuance of the

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Emancipation Proclamation in early 1863. Aimed only at U.S. states and territories then in rebellion against the United States, that declaration freed no slaves but did make abolition a northern goal in the Civil War. At the conclusion of the war, Lincoln was about to face the challenge of developing a Reconstruction policy for the defeated Confederacy but was assassinated by a disgruntled southerner, John Wilkes Booth. Locke, Alain (1886-1954): Philosopher and writer. After studying at Harvard University, Oxford University, and the University of Berlin, Locke served on the faculty at Howard University (1912-1953). He celebrated black cultural contributions in works such as The New Negro: An Interpretation (1925) and a special issue of the journal Survey Graphic, which announced the arrival of a “Harlem Renaissance” and published work by Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, and W. E. B. Du Bois. Locke also wrote or edited Race Contacts and Inter-Racial Relations (1916), Opportunity (an annual review of the state of black writing), Negro Art: Past and Present (1936), and The Negro and His Music (1940). Lowery, Joseph E. (1924): Cleric and civil rights leader. The pastor of the Warren Street Church in Birmingham, Alabama (1952-1961), Lowery was one of the cofounders of the Southern Negro Leaders Conference, which evolved into the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) in 1957, and served as its first vice president under Martin Luther King, Jr. He became president of the SCLC in 1977 and pastor of Cascade United Methodist Church in Atlanta, Georgia, in 1986. McKay, Claude (1889-1948): Jamaican-born poet, novelist, and essayist. A key figure in the Harlem Renaissance, McKay is noted for his poetry about his experiences with American racism. His poetry volumes include Constab Ballads (1912), Songs of Jamaica (1912), and Harlem Shadows (1922)—which established his reputation as a major Harlem Renaissance figure. McKay’s fiction includes the short stories of Gingertown (1932) and the novels Home to Harlem (1928), Banjo: A Story Without a Plot (1929), and Banana Bottom (1933). He also published an autobiography, A Long Way from Home (1937), and the nonfiction Harlem: Negro Metropolis (1940).

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McKissick, Floyd (1922-1991): Lawyer and civil rights leader. After suing the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill for admission to its law school, he became the first African American to earn a degree there. He was later the head of the Congress of Racial Equality (1966-1968). From 1968 to 1980, he worked unsuccessfully to establish a new and self-sufficient community in Warren County, North Carolina, known as Soul City. Malcolm X (1925-1965): Black nationalist leader. Malcolm was born Malcolm Little in a Nebraska family that was committed to Marcus Garvey’s United Negro Improvement Association. After his father’s murder by white racists, he left school and went to New York, where he was convicted of burglary. While in prison, he converted to the Nation of Islam. A brilliant speaker, he began making provocative, antiwhite statements, for which he was expelled from the Nation of Islam by Elijah Muhammad. He then formed the Organization of AfroAmerican Unity and Muslim Mosque Inc. in 1964. After undertaking a pilgrimage to Mecca, he converted to orthodox Islam, changed his name to El-Hajj Malik El-Shabazz, and moderated his political and social views. In 1965, he was shot to death by Black Muslims. He was the author, with Alex Haley, of The Autobiography of Malcolm X (1965). Marshall, Thurgood (1908-1993): Lawyer, civil rights activist, and jurist. Marshall served as chief legal counsel for the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (1938-1961) and played a key role in the landmark Brown v. Board of Education case (1954), in which the U.S. Supreme Court overturned the “separate but equal” doctrine in public education. Marshall won twenty-nine of the thirty-two cases that he argued before the Supreme Court. He later became a federal circuit court judge (1961-1967) and was appointed the first African American justice on the U.S. Supreme Court (1967-1991). Meredith, James (1933): Civil rights activist. Meredith became the first African American to attend the University of Mississippi in 1962. His admission to the university generated riots and the stationing of federal troops on the campus. In 1966, while leading a march to encourage black voter registration, he was shot by a sniper but recovered. That same year, he wrote Three Years in Mississippi (1966).

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Morrison, Toni (1931): Writer. Born Chloe Anthony Wofford, Morrison has incorporated African and African American folklore, legend, and mythology into her novels. Her works also contain many autobiographical references. Her novel Beloved (1987), which examines the brutality of American slavery, won the Pulitzer Prize in fiction in 1988 and was made into a motion picture in 1998. In 1993, Morrison became the first African American to win the Nobel Prize in Literature. Her books include The Bluest Eye (1970), Sula (1974), Song of Solomon (1977), Tar Baby (1981), and Jazz (1992). Muhammad, Elijah (1897-1975): Religious and black nationalist leader. Born Elijah Poole to a former slave, Muhammad became chief assistant to W. D. Fard, the founder of the LostFound Nation of Islam, in 1930. Upon Fard’s mysterious disappearance in 1934, he succeeded to leadership of the Nation of Islam. In that capacity, he preached racial segregation, black integrity, and the need for economic independence from whites. His support for Japan in World War II and the conviction of three members of the Nation of Islam for the assassination of Malcolm X in 1965 led to unfavorable press coverage, but his movement continued to grow, especially among the underemployed of the major cities. Newton, Huey P. (1942-1989): Black activist. In 1966, Newton was the cofounder, with Bobby Seale, of the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense, which became a major force in California politics. The following year, he was convicted of manslaughter in the killing of an Oakland police officer, but his conviction was later overturned. In 1977, he helped elect Lionel Wilson as the first black mayor of Oakland. After frequently being in legal trouble throughout the 1970’s and 1980’s, he was killed by a drug dealer in 1989. Owens, Jesse (1913-1980): Track and field athlete. One of the first great all-around track and field athletes, Owens earned four gold medals at the 1936 Berlin Olympics (100- and 200-meter races, 400-meter relay, broad jump). He became internationally famous in that Olympiad when German leader Adolf Hitler refused to present Owens his gold medals. Owens later traveled and spoke widely on the value of sports in breaking down racial barriers.

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Parks, Rosa (1913): Civil rights activist. While serving as secretary of the Montgomery, Alabama, chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People during the 1950’s, Parks was arrested and fined for refusing to give up her seat to a white passenger on a Montgomery, Alabama, bus. Her arrest sparked a 382-day citywide bus boycott aimed at desegregating public transportation. White harassment eventually led Parks and her family to move to Detroit, Michigan, where she worked in the office of Congressman John Conyers and continued to campaign for civil rights. Patterson, Frederick D. (1901-1988): Educator. A faculty member and later president of Tuskegee Institute, Patterson was also chairman of the R. R. Moton Memorial Institute. In 1944, he organized the United Negro College Fund to aid historically black colleges and universities. Payne, Daniel Alexander (1811-1893): Educator, abolitionist, and cleric. Born in South Carolina to free black parents, Patterson opened a school for black students in Charleston in 1829. After his school was closed by an act of the South Carolina legislature, he traveled north to study and delivered powerful abolitionist speeches throughout the 1840’s and 1850’s. In 1852, he was elected a bishop of the African Methodist Episcopal Church. In 1863, he bought Wilberforce University from the Methodist Episcopal Church and devoted the rest of his life to developing the university and overseeing missionary endeavors. His writings include Recollections of Seventy Years (1888) and History of the African Methodist Episcopal Church (1891). Powell, Adam Clayton, Jr. (1908-1972): New York City politician. Instrumental in securing better treatment for African Americans in Harlem during the Depression of the 1930’s, Powell succeeded his father as pastor of the Abyssinian Baptist Church in 1936. He also served in various New York government posts until 1944, when he was elected to the U.S. House of Representatives (1945-1967, 1969-1971). While a congressman, he sponsored more than fifty pieces of social legislation, many aimed at ending discrimination against minorities. In 1960, he became chairman of the House Committee on Education and Labor. In 1967, he was censured in the House and unseated for misuse of public funds but was readmitted the following year.

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Powell, Colin (1937): Military leader and government official. Born in New York City to Jamaican immigrants, Powell joined the U.S. Army and served two tours of duty in the Vietnam War. He later served as a military assistant to the secretary of defense (1983) and as national security adviser to President Ronald Reagan (1987-1989). Under President George Bush, he served as chairman of the joint chiefs of staff (19891993)—a position that made him the highest-ranking African American officer in military history, as well as the highestranking officer in the United States at the time. In that position, he gained international recognition for his role in conducting the Persian Gulf War (1991). His popularity and vocal support for personal responsibility made him an attractive political candidate after he left the military. He addressed the 1996 Republican National Convention in San Diego, heightening rumors that he might one day run for high office, but he declined to seek office. After George W. Bush was elected president in 2000, Powell became U.S. secretary of state. He distinguished himself as a voice of moderation through the new military conflicts in which the United States became involved but resigned his cabinet post after Bush’s reelection in 2004. He was succeeded as secretary of state by Condoleezza Rice. Randolph, A. Philip (1889-1979): Labor leader and civil rights activist. Randolph is remembered as a key figure in the racial integration of American labor. In 1925, he began a successful fight to have the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters recognized as an agent in negotiation with the Pullman Company. His actions led to Pullman’s signing a contract with the porters in 1937. In 1941, Randolph was instrumental in persuading President Franklin D. Roosevelt to sign Executive Order 8802, which banned discrimination in employment by companies with defense contracts. Randolph’s threat to organize a black boycott of the military draft in 1948 helped persuade President Harry S. Truman to sign Executive Order 9981, which ended racial segregation in the armed forces. Randolph was a symbolic and unifying force when he acted as chairman and provided opening remarks for the 1963 March on Washington. In 1968, he retired as president of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters.

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Rice, Condoleezza (1954): Educator and foreign policy expert. From 1989 to 1991, Rice served as a director of Soviet and East European Affairs with the National Security Council. She also served as a strategic adviser to the Joint Chiefs of Staff. In 1990, President George Bush appointed her his assistant for national security affairs, and during that same year, Rice sat at the bargaining table when Bush met Soviet premier Mikhail Gorbachev in Malta. After the Bush administration left office in 1993, Rice became provost at Stanford University; she was the first African American chief academic officer and budget officer at the university and one of the highest-ranking black college administrators in the entire nation. In 2001, newly elected President George W. Bush appointed Rice his national security adviser. During her four years in that office, Rice was considered to be one of the most influential members of the Bush administration. In 2005, after Bush was reelected, he appointed Rice to succeed Colin Powell as secretary of state. Robeson, Paul (1898-1976): Singer and actor. The son of a runaway slave, Robeson earned a law degree at Columbia University and became a successful stage actor after being discovered by playwright Eugene O’Neill during the 1920’s. His performance in O’Neill’s The Emperor Jones (1923) led to a successful singing career. Active in national and international civil and human rights campaigns, Robeson spoke out vigorously for the independence of Europe’s African colonies. His trips to the Soviet Union and other associations with communists led to the revocation of his passport in 1950 and a decline in his career. He regained his passport after an eight-year legal battle in 1958 and then moved to London, where he lived until 1963. His published autobiography is Here I Stand (1958). Robinson, Jackie (1919-1972): Baseball player; after a stellar career at the University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA), Robinson left in his junior year to play professional football for the Los Angeles Bulldogs. After serving as a lieutenant in the U.S. Army during World War II, he played professional baseball with the Kansas City Monarchs of the Negro American League. In 1947, he became the first black player in modern Major League Baseball history. During his ten-year career with the Brooklyn Dodgers, he won many honors on the field,

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while responding to hostility from other players and fans with grace. His success paved the way for the expansion of opportunities for black athletes in all professional sports. He was inducted into the Baseball Hall of Fame in 1962. Roosevelt, Franklin D. (1882-1945): Thirty-second president of the United States (1933-1945). During his three-plus terms in office, Roosevelt led the nation through the Great Depression and most of World War II and was seen as a supporter of civil rights for African Americans. He appointed more than two dozen African Americans to federal offices, and those appointees formed an unofficial Black Cabinet. In 1941, Roosevelt signed Executive Order 8802, which prohibited discrimination on the basis of race or color in the defense industry and armed forces. Roosevelt eased restrictions on opportunities for African Americans in the government and the military services but left the decision to order full desegregation of the military to his successor, Harry S. Truman. Rustin, Bayard (1910-1987): Civil rights leader. During the Depression, Rustin organized the Young Communist League (1936-1941). Afterward, he worked with James Farmer on the Chicago Committee of Racial Equality, which developed into the Congress of Racial Equality. He was later a founding member of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. In 1963, he served as organizational coordinator of the March on Washington, after which he became executive director of the A. Philip Randolph Institute (1964-1979). In 1975, he founded the Organization for Black Americans to Support Israel. Scott, Dred (1795-1858): Missouri slave whose struggle to win his freedom led to one of the most infamous rulings in U.S. Supreme Court history. During the 1850’s, he sued for his freedom on the grounds that because he had accompanied his master into the free state of Illinois he should no longer be considered a slave. After going through Missouri’s courts, his case reached the U.S. Supreme Court in 1857. In its Scott v. Sandford decision, the Court ruled that Scott, as a slave, was not a legal citizen and therefore had no standing before the courts. Scott himself was eventually freed by his owner shortly before his death the following year, but the Supreme Court’s ruling in the case defined slaves as noncitizens. It would not be until ratification of

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the Fourteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution in 1868 that African Americans were legally considered citizens. Seale, Bobby (1936): Black activist. Seale was cofounder, with Huey P. Newton, of the Black Panther Party for SelfDefense in 1966. In 1971, he was tried for the kidnapping and killing of a suspected police informant, but his case ended in a mistrial. Disenchanted with revolutionary politics, Seale left the Panthers in 1974. His writings include Seize the Time: The Story of the Black Panther Party (1970) and A Lonely Rage: The Autobiography of Bobby Seale (1978). Sharpton, Al (1954): Christian cleric and social activist. After gaining prominence for his Pentecostal preaching in Brooklyn, Sharpton became active in the Civil Rights movement. He served as youth director of Jesse Jackson’s Operation Breadbasket. He also briefly served as a bodyguard for singer James Brown and worked with fight promoter Don King. In 1971, Sharpton founded the National Youth Movement (later renamed the United African Movement). A politically controversial figure whose motives have often been questioned, Sharpton has been involved in many high-profile racial incidents in New York City, including the Bernhard Goetz murder trial in 1984, the Howard Beach killing in 1986, the Tawana Brawley affair in 1987, and the Bensonhurst killing in 1989. In 2004, he campaigned for the Democratic nomination for the presidency and earned some credibility as a mainstream politician. Stevens, Thaddeus (1792-1868): Radical Republican politician, abolitionist, and advocate of African American civil rights. As a Pennsylvania congressman (1849-1853, 1859-1868), Stevens opposed fugitive slave laws; led the Radical Republican plan for Reconstruction after the Civil War, and was instrumental in framing the Fourteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution (1868). He was also one of the leaders in Congress’s impeachment of President Andrew Johnson. Thomas, Clarence (1948): Second African American associate justice on the U.S. Supreme Court (1992). After being appointed to the Court by President George Bush in 1991, Thomas had to endure a difficult confirmation battle in the Senate that was highlighted by the testimony of his former aide Anita F. Hill, who accused him of sexual harassment.

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Thomas remained a controversial justice because of his refusal to support positions many believed were essential to African American well-being. Till, Emmett (1941-1955): Lynching victim. A Chicago teenager, Till was killed by white racists while visiting relatives in Mississippi. His murder helped call national attention to the virulence of racism in the South, and the speedy acquittal, by an all-white jury, of his accused murderers revealed the failings of the justice system. In 2004, the U.S. Justice Department announced that it was reopening its investigation into Till’s murder. Truman, Harry S. (1884-1972): Thirty-third president of the United States (1945-1953). After rising from the vice presidency to the presidency on the death of Franklin D. Roosevelt early in the latter’s fourth term, Truman became the first U.S. president to call openly for civil rights legislation to improve the social and political condition of African Americans. In 1946, he appointed the President’s Committee on Civil Rights, which the following year issued a report titled To Secure These Rights. In 1948, Truman completed the work begun by his predecessor by banning racial segregation in the armed forces with Executive Order 9981. Truth, Sojourner (c. 1797-1883): Abolitionist. Born into slavery as Isabella Baumfree, Truth was freed by the New York State Emancipation Act in 1827. Afterward, she preached and lectured widely to abolitionist audiences, adopting the symbolic name Sojourner Truth in 1843. During the Civil War, she raised money for soldiers and runaway slaves and served as councilor with the National Freedmen’s Relief Association. She dictated her autobiography, The Narrative of Sojourner Truth (1850). Tubman, Harriet (c. 1820-1913): Abolitionist. Born Araminta Ross in Maryland, Tubman escaped from slavery in 1848. Afterward, she helped rescue more than three hundred slaves in nineteen forays along the Underground Railroad. She also helped John Brown recruit men for his raid on Harpers Ferry in 1858. After 1860, she spoke widely on emancipation and women’s rights. During the Civil War, she served as nurse and spy for the Union army and was later buried with military honors.

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Turner, Henry McNeal (1834-1915): Religious leader. Born to free parents in South Carolina, Turner was tutored by lawyers for whom he worked as a janitor. In 1853, he became a preacher in the Methodist Episcopal Church South. Five years later, he switched his affiliation and preached for African Methodist Episcopal churches in Baltimore and Washington, D.C. (18581863). During the Civil War, he served as chaplain to the First U.S. Colored Troops. After the war, he was elected a Georgia State representative (1868-1869, 1870). In 1880, he was elected a bishop of the African Methodist Episcopal Church. After campaigning for full voting rights for African Americans, he advocated a return to Africa when the federal civil rights laws were overturned by the U.S. Supreme Court in 1883. His proclamation that “God is a Negro” anticipated modern black theology. Turner, Nat (1800-1831): Slave rebellion leader. A Virginia slave, Turner planned and led the bloodiest slave revolt in U.S. history in Virginia’s Southampton County in 1831. More than sixty slaves and free blacks rose up against white landowners and killed at least fifty-five people, including women and children. All the rebels were eventually killed or executed. Turner himself was caught and tried and hanged. Although his revolt was an isolated event in a remote part of Virginia, it had a profound impact on white southerners, who responded with more repressive laws and a wave of lynchings. Walker, Alice (1944): Writer and poet. Walker’s works deal principally with the experiences of black women living in a racist and sexist society. Her early books were critically acclaimed, but she did not become widely popular until publishing her third novel, The Color Purple (1982), which won a Pulitzer Prize in fiction and was adapted to film in 1985. Walker has also been a champion of the works of Zora Neale Hurston. Walker has published in several genres, including poetry: Once (1968) and Revolutionary Petunias and Other Poems (1973); novels: The Third Life of Grange Copeland (1970), Meridian (1976), and Possessing the Secret of Joy (1992); short stories: “In Love and Trouble” (1973) and “You Can’t Keep a Good Woman Down” (1976); and criticism: A Zora Neale Hurston Reader (1980). Warren, Earl (1891-1974): Former governor of California whom President Dwight D. Eisenhower appointed chief justice of the

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United States in 1953. Warren took office at a moment when the Court was facing new challenges to lower court rulings on school segregation. Under Warren’s strong leadership, the Court reached a unanimous decision in the landmark Brown v. Board of Education (1954) case that outlawed desegregation in public schools and paved the way for new civil rights legislation and additional progressive Supreme Court rulings. Warren himself is remembered for destroying the “separate but equal” doctrine by declaring that “in the field of public education the doctrine of ‘separate but equal’ has no place. Separate educational facilities are inherently unequal.” Washington, Booker T. (1856-1915): Educator. Born a slave in Virginia, Washington became committed to the idea that education would raise African Americans to equality. After teaching Native Americans at the Hampton Institute (1879-1881), he founded the Tuskegee Normal and Industrial Institute in 1881 and served as its president through the rest of his life. He also cofounded the National Negro Business League in 1900. He advised Presidents William Howard Taft and Theodore Roosevelt on racial issues and promoted what has been called the “Atlanta Compromise,”—the doctrine of African Americans accepting segregation in return for greater economic opportunities. His conservative racial views appealed to many white Americans who feared more radical change but were opposed by other African American leaders, including W. E. B. Du Bois. Washington’s autobiography, Up from Slavery (1901), became one of the most widely read books by African Americans during the early twentieth century. Wells-Barnett, Ida B. (1862-1931): Journalist. Wells-Barnett was editor and part owner of the black newspaper Memphis Free Speech. Her vigorous campaigns against lynching led to a mob attack on her newspaper’s offices. With Frederick Douglass and Ferdinand L. Barnett, Wells-Barnett wrote “The Reason Why the Colored American Is Not in the World’s Columbian Exposition” (1893). She also published the antilynching pamphlet “Red Record” (1895) and defended W. E. B. Du Bois’s criticisms of Booker T. Washington in the former’s The Souls of Black Folk (1903). In 1909, she helped Du Bois found the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People.

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White, Walter (1893-1955): Civil rights leader. The executive secretary of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People from 1931 to 1955, White was an energetic and outspoken advocate of African American rights. He was also a fervent campaigner against lynching and fought a long and fruitless campaign for passage of a federal antilynching law. His writings include two fictional accounts of lynchings and a report on African American service in World War II. Wilder, L. Douglas (1931): Virginia politician. A decorated Korean War veteran, Wilder became a successful Virginia trial lawyer and was an officer in the National Urban League during the Civil Rights movement. In 1969, he became the first African American elected to the Virginia senate since Reconstruction. In 1985 he was elected lieutenant governor; four years later, he was elected governor—the first African American elected governor of any U.S. state. Wilkins, Roy (1901-1981): Journalist and civil rights leader. Wilkins was on the staff of the Kansas City Call (1923-1931). He served as assistant executive secretary of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) from 1931 to 1955, when he became the organization’s executive secretary. He remained in the latter position until 1964 and then became the NAACP’s executive director (1965-1977). He was also chairman of the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights. Wilkins was the editor of The Crisis from 1934 to 1949. Woodson, Carter (1875-1950): Scholar. Often known as the “Father of Modern Black History,” Woodson formed the Association for the Study of Negro Life and History (later the Association for the Study of Afro-American Life and History) in 1915. A year later, that body established the Journal of Negro History. Woodson also founded Associated Publishers in 1920 and the Negro History Bulletin in 1921. Woodson is credited with creating Negro History Week, which later expanded into Black History Month. His many books include The Education of the Negro Prior to 1861 (1915); The Negro in Our History (1922), The Miseducation of the Negro (1933), and African Heroes and Heroines (1939). Wright, Richard (1908-1960): Novelist. Wright used personal experiences from his Mississippi youth to dramatize the brutal

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effects of racism in such books as Uncle Tom’s Children, which won the Best Work of Fiction by a Works Progress Administration writer in 1938; Native Son (1940); and the largely autobiographical Black Boy (1945). A member of the Communist Party from 1933 to 1944, he moved to Paris in 1946. There he continued writing. His later books include The Outsider (1953), Black Power (1954), White Man Listen (1957), and Eight Men (1961). American Hunger (1977) is a continuation of his autobiography. Young, Andrew (1932): Civil rights activist, politician, and diplomat. An aide and confidant of Martin Luther King, Jr., during the early 1960’s, Young was executive vice president of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference in 1967. During the 1970’s, he entered Georgia state politics. He served as a Georgia state representative (1973-1977) and was mayor of Atlanta (1981-1989). In between, he was made U.S. ambassador to the United Nations (1977-1979) by President Jimmy Carter, a former governor of Georgia. Young also chaired the Atlanta Committee for the 1996 Olympic Games. Young, Whitney (1921-1971): Educator and civil rights leader. Young was executive director of the St. Paul chapter of the Minnesota Urban League (1950-1954); dean of Atlanta University School of Social Work (1954-1961); and executive director of the National Urban League (1961-1971). During the 1960’s, he called for a “domestic Marshall Plan” to end black poverty and helped President Lyndon B. Johnson craft his War on Poverty. In 1969, he received the Medal of Freedom. His writings include To Be Equal (1964) and Beyond Racism (1969). John Powell and the Editors

Category Index List of Contents Abolition . . . . . . . . . . Affirmative Action. . . . . Agriculture . . . . . . . . . Arts, Literature, and Music . . . . . . . . . . Black Nationalism . . . . . Civil Rights and Liberties . Civil Rights Movement . . Court Cases. . . . . . . . . Crime . . . . . . . . . . . . Demographics . . . . . . . Desegregation . . . . . . . Discrimination . . . . . . . Economics . . . . . . . . . Education . . . . . . . . . . Events . . . . . . . . . . . . Family Issues . . . . . . . . Justice System . . . . . . . Labor and Employment. . Law Enforcement . . . . . Laws. . . . . . . . . . . . .

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1128 1128 1128 1129 1129 1131 1131 1131 1132 1132 1133 1133 1134 1135 1135 1135 1136

ABOLITION Abolition, 1 Abolitionist movement and women, 5 African Methodist Episcopal Church, 26 African Methodist Episcopal Zion Churches, 30 American Anti-Slavery Society, 42 American Colonization Society, 46 Amistad slave revolt, 47 Antislavery laws of 1777 and 1807, 58 Bleeding Kansas, 134

Media . . . . . . . . . . . Military . . . . . . . . . . Mob Violence. . . . . . . Organizations . . . . . . Pan-Africanism . . . . . Peoples . . . . . . . . . . Politics and Government Popular Culture . . . . . Race Relations . . . . . . Racism . . . . . . . . . . Reconstruction . . . . . . Religion . . . . . . . . . . Science and Technology. Segregation . . . . . . . . Slave Revolts . . . . . . . Slave Trade . . . . . . . . Slavery . . . . . . . . . . Sports . . . . . . . . . . . Urbanization . . . . . . . Voting Rights . . . . . . . Women’s Issues . . . . .

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1136 1136 1137 1137 1138 1138 1138 1139 1139 1140 1140 1140 1140 1140 1141 1141 1141 1141 1141 1142 1142

Civil War, 226 Clotilde capture, 234 Compromise of 1850, 243 Confiscation Acts of 1861 and 1862, 249 Emancipation Proclamation, 323 Free blacks, 366 Freedmen’s Bureau, 367 Fugitive Slave Law of 1793, 382 Fugitive Slave Law of 1850, 387 Harpers Ferry raid, 436 Liberator, The, 532 National Council of Colored People, 654 Negro Conventions, 667 North Star, The, 689

1128

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Category Index

Pennsylvania Society for the Abolition of Slavery, 703 Proslavery argument, 731 Slavery, 826 Slavery and the justice system, 850 Thirteenth Amendment, 922 Turner’s slave insurrection, 933 Underground Railroad, 947 AFFIRMATIVE ACTION Adarand Constructors v. Peña, 13 Affirmative action, 15 Bakke case, 71 Civil Rights Act of 1991, 198 Employment, 327 Equal Employment Opportunity Act of 1972, 331 Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, 338 Fullilove v. Klutznick, 391 United Steelworkers of America v. Weber, 962 AGRICULTURE Agriculture, 32 Atlanta Compromise, 67 Demographic trends, 283 Economic trends, 304 Employment, 327 Great Migration, 399 Sharecropping, 806 ARTS, LITERATURE, AND MUSIC Anderson’s Lincoln Memorial concert, 51 Black Is Beautiful movement, 114 Film history, 352 Harlem Renaissance, 426 Literature, 537 Media, the, 569 Music, 624 Stereotypes, 898

BLACK NATIONALISM African Liberation Day, 25 Black Christian Nationalist Movement, 95 Black Is Beautiful movement, 114 Black nationalism, 118 Black Panther Party, 123 Black Power movement, 129 Black United Students, 132 Combahee River Collective, 241 Congressional Black Caucus, 256 Hampton-Clark deaths, 424 League of Revolutionary Black Workers, 530 Malcolm X assassination, 559 Million Man March, 593 Million Woman March, 597 Nation of Islam, 631 National Coalition of Blacks for Reparations in America, 653 Pan-Africanism, 701 Republic of New Africa, 765 Universal Negro Improvement Association, 969 CIVIL RIGHTS AND LIBERTIES Brown v. Mississippi, 144 Civil Rights Act of 1866, 177 Civil Rights Act of 1957, 182 Civil Rights Act of 1960, 183 Civil Rights Act of 1964, 188 Civil Rights Act of 1968, 195 Civil Rights Act of 1991, 198 Civil Rights Acts of 1866-1875, 199 Civil Rights cases, 202 Civil Rights movement, 204 Civil Rights Restoration Act, 215 Colored Women’s League, 240 Edmonson v. Leesville Concrete Company, 314 Edwards v. South Carolina, 322 Fourteenth Amendment, 357 Griffin v. Breckenridge, 413 Integration, 454

Category Index King beating case, 515 Marshall’s appointment to the Supreme Court, 564 National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, 636 National Association for the Advancement of Colored People Legal Defense and Educational Fund, 643 National Association for the Advancement of Colored People v. Alabama, 650 National Council of Negro Women, 658 Negro Conventions, 667 Niagara Movement, 681 Politics and government, 713 Poll taxes, 723 President’s Committee on Civil Rights, 729 R.A.V. v. City of St. Paul, 735 Rainbow Coalition, 753 Scott v. Sandford, 783 Segregation, 790 Separate but equal doctrine, 805 Sit-ins, 818 Smith v. Allwright, 875 Thirteenth Amendment, 922 Twenty-fourth Amendment, 941 United States Commission on Civil Rights, 954 United States v. Cruikshank, 959 Voting Rights Act of 1965, 983 Voting Rights Act of 1975, 990 Wisconsin v. Mitchell, 1018 CIVIL RIGHTS MOVEMENT Birmingham March, 91 Chicago sit-ins, 154 Civil Rights movement, 204 Civil Rights movement and children, 214 Civil rights worker murders, 219 Congress of Racial Equality, 250

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1129

Council of Federated Organizations, 260 Edwards v. South Carolina, 322 Freedom Rides, 372 Freedom Summer, 374 Greensboro sit-ins, 406 “I Have a Dream” speech, 449 Integration, 454 Jews and African Americans, 470 Journey of Reconciliation, 481 King assassination, 507 Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party, 603 Montgomery bus boycott, 614 National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, 636 National Association for the Advancement of Colored People Legal Defense and Educational Fund, 643 National Urban League, 659 New York riots, 674 Poor People’s March on Washington, 725 President’s Committee on Civil Rights, 729 School desegregation, 770 Segregation, 790 Selma-Montgomery march, 797 Sit-ins, 818 Southern Christian Leadership Conference, 879 Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, 908 Summit Meeting of National Negro Leaders, 912 University of Mississippi desegregation, 974 Vietnam War, 979 COURT CASES Adarand Constructors v. Peña, 13 Albemarle Paper Company v. Moody, 39

1130

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Category Index

Alexander v. Holmes County Board of Education, 40 Bakke case, 71 Batson v. Kentucky, 90 Bolling v. Sharpe, 137 Brown v. Board of Education, 140 Brown v. Mississippi, 144 Buchanan v. Warley, 147 Burton v. Wilmington Parking Authority, 150 Civil Rights cases, 202 Cooper v. Aaron, 258 Cumming v. Richmond County Board of Education, 276 Edmonson v. Leesville Concrete Company, 314 Edwards v. South Carolina, 322 Evans v. Abney, 340 Fullilove v. Klutznick, 391 Gomillion v. Lightfoot, 397 Green v. County School Board of New Kent County, 404 Griffin v. Breckenridge, 413 Griggs v. Duke Power Company, 415 Groves v. Slaughter, 417 Grovey v. Townsend, 418 Guinn v. United States, 419 Harper v. Virginia Board of Elections, 435 Heart of Atlanta Motel v. United States, 442 Jones v. Alfred H. Mayer Company, 479 Katzenbach v. McClung, 496 Keyes v. Denver School District No. 1, 506 Lassiter v. Northampton County Board of Elections, 530 Louisville, New Orleans, and Texas Railway Company v. Mississippi, 552 McCleskey v. Kemp, 557 McLaurin v. Oklahoma State Regents for Higher Education, 558

Martin v. Wilks, 568 Milliken v. Bradley, 592 Missouri ex rel. Gaines v. Canada, 612 Mobile v. Bolden, 613 Moore v. Dempsey, 619 Moose Lodge v. Irvis, 620 National Association for the Advancement of Colored People v. Alabama, 650 Newberry v. United States, 679 Nixon v. Condon, 685 Nixon v. Herndon, 686 Norris v. Alabama, 687 Palmer v. Thompson, 700 Patterson v. McLean Credit Union, 702 Plessy v. Ferguson, 708 Powell v. Alabama, 727 Powers v. Ohio, 728 R.A.V. v. City of St. Paul, 735 Reitman v. Mulkey, 763 Runyon v. McCrary, 768 Scott v. Sandford, 783 Scottsboro trials, 786 Shaw v. Hunt, 808 Shaw v. Reno, 810 Shelley v. Kraemer, 812 Slaughterhouse Cases, 819 Smith v. Allwright, 875 Strauder v. West Virginia, 907 Swann v. Charlotte-Mecklenberg Board of Education, 913 Sweatt v. Painter, 917 Terry v. Adams, 921 United States v. Classic, 958 United States v. Cruikshank, 959 United States v. Reese, 961 United Steelworkers of America v. Weber, 962 Washington v. Davis, 996 Williams v. Mississippi, 1017 Wisconsin v. Mitchell, 1018 Yarbrough, Ex parte, 1025

Category Index CRIME Brown v. Mississippi, 144 Church bombings, 169 Church burnings, 174 Civil rights worker murders, 219 Clinton massacre, 233 Dyer antilynching bill, 302 Fugitive Slave Law of 1793, 382 Fugitive Slave Law of 1850, 387 Hampton-Clark deaths, 424 Harlins murder, 434 Harpers Ferry raid, 436 Hawkins murder, 441 King assassination, 507 King beating case, 515 Lynching, 553 McCleskey v. Kemp, 557 Malcolm X assassination, 559 Moynihan Report, 623 Newberry v. United States, 679 Orangeburg massacre, 699 Powell v. Alabama, 727 R.A.V. v. City of St. Paul, 735 Scottsboro trials, 786 Simpson murder trial, 813 Till lynching, 931 Tuskegee experiment, 939 DEMOGRAPHICS Agriculture, 32 Black colleges and universities, 107 Black flight, 112 Black Jews, 115 Cubans and African Americans, 270 Demographic trends, 283 Economic trends, 304 Free blacks, 366 Great Migration, 399 Haitians, 421 Jamaicans, 466 Jews and African Americans, 470 Koreans and African Americans, 520

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1131

Native Americans and African Americans, 661 One-drop rule, 698 Segregation on the frontier, 793 Slavery and women, 858 Slavery in Massachusetts, 865 Slavery in Virginia, 870 West Indians, 1002 DESEGREGATION Alexander v. Holmes County Board of Education, 40 Bolling v. Sharpe, 137 Brown v. Board of Education, 140 Civil Rights Acts of 1866-1875, 199 Civil Rights movement, 204 Cooper v. Aaron, 258 Cumming v. Richmond County Board of Education, 276 Defense industry desegregation, 277 Fair Housing Act, 342 Green v. County School Board of New Kent County, 404 Greensboro sit-ins, 406 Heart of Atlanta Motel v. United States, 442 Integration, 454 Jones v. Alfred H. Mayer Company, 479 Katzenbach v. McClung, 496 Keyes v. Denver School District No. 1, 506 Little Rock school desegregation crisis, 544 McLaurin v. Oklahoma State Regents for Higher Education, 558 Military, 579 Military desegregation, 583 Milliken v. Bradley, 592 Reitman v. Mulkey, 763 Runyon v. McCrary, 768 School desegregation, 770

1132

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Category Index

Segregation, 790 Sit-ins, 818 Southern Manifesto, 887 Swann v. Charlotte-Mecklenberg Board of Education, 913 Sweatt v. Painter, 917 University of Mississippi desegregation, 974 DISCRIMINATION Adarand Constructors v. Peña, 13 Affirmative action, 15 Albemarle Paper Company v. Moody, 39 Batson v. Kentucky, 90 Black codes, 103 Buchanan v. Warley, 147 Burton v. Wilmington Parking Authority, 150 Civil Rights Act of 1968, 195 Civil Rights Act of 1991, 198 Civil Rights Acts of 1866-1875, 199 Civil Rights cases, 202 Cowboys, 267 Disfranchisement laws in Mississippi, 294 Employment, 327 Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, 338 Evans v. Abney, 340 Fair Employment Practices Committee, 340 Fair Housing Act, 342 Fifteenth Amendment, 347 Fullilove v. Klutznick, 391 Gerrymandering, 393 Grandfather clauses, 398 Greensboro sit-ins, 406 Griggs v. Duke Power Company, 415 Grovey v. Townsend, 418 Guinn v. United States, 419 Heart of Atlanta Motel v. United States, 442

Jim Crow laws, 476 Jones v. Alfred H. Mayer Company, 479 Katzenbach v. McClung, 496 Louisville, New Orleans, and Texas Railway Company v. Mississippi, 552 McCleskey v. Kemp, 557 Martin v. Wilks, 568 Missouri ex rel. Gaines v. Canada, 612 Montgomery bus boycott, 614 Moose Lodge v. Irvis, 620 Nixon v. Condon, 685 Nixon v. Herndon, 686 Palmer v. Thompson, 700 Patterson v. McLean Credit Union, 702 Plessy v. Ferguson, 708 Poll taxes, 723 Powers v. Ohio, 728 Reitman v. Mulkey, 763 Restrictive covenants, 766 Runyon v. McCrary, 768 Segregation, 790 Separate but equal doctrine, 805 Shelley v. Kraemer, 812 Slave codes, 821 Understanding tests, 952 Washington v. Davis, 996 White primaries, 1009 ECONOMICS Agriculture, 32 Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, 138 Defense industry desegregation, 277 Economic trends, 304 Employment, 327 Equal Employment Opportunity Act of 1972, 331 Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, 338 Fullilove v. Klutznick, 391

Category Index Great Migration, 399 League of Revolutionary Black Workers, 530 Million Man March, 593 Montgomery bus boycott, 614 Moose Lodge v. Irvis, 620 Moynihan Report, 623 National Coalition of Blacks for Reparations in America, 653 Negro Conventions, 667 Patterson v. McLean Credit Union, 702 Poor People’s March on Washington, 725 Restrictive covenants, 766 Sharecropping, 806 Slaughterhouse Cases, 819 Talented Tenth, 919 United Negro College Fund, 953 United Steelworkers of America v. Weber, 962 Universal Negro Improvement Association, 969 EDUCATION Affirmative action, 15 Afrocentrism, 31 Alexander v. Holmes County Board of Education, 40 Ashmun Institute, 62 Atlanta Compromise, 67 Bakke case, 71 Black colleges and universities, 107 Black United Students, 132 Bolling v. Sharpe, 137 Brown v. Board of Education, 140 Civil Rights Restoration Act, 215 Cooper v. Aaron, 258 Cumming v. Richmond County Board of Education, 276 Education, 315 Equal Employment Opportunity Act of 1972, 331 Green v. County School Board of New Kent County, 404

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1133

Keyes v. Denver School District No. 1, 506 Little Rock school desegregation crisis, 544 McLaurin v. Oklahoma State Regents for Higher Education, 558 Milliken v. Bradley, 592 Missouri ex rel. Gaines v. Canada, 612 National Association for the Advancement of Colored People Legal Defense and Educational Fund, 643 Orangeburg massacre, 699 Runyon v. McCrary, 768 School desegregation, 770 Science and technology, 776 Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, 908 Swann v. Charlotte-Mecklenberg Board of Education, 913 Talented Tenth, 919 United Negro College Fund, 953 University of Mississippi desegregation, 974 White Citizens’ Councils, 1007 EMPLOYMENT. See LABOR AND EMPLOYMENT EVENTS African Liberation Day, 25 Amistad slave revolt, 47 Anderson’s Lincoln Memorial concert, 51 Atlanta Compromise, 67 Baseball’s racial integration, 82 Birmingham March, 91 “Black Manifesto,” 117 Bleeding Kansas, 134 Brownsville incident, 145 Charleston race riots, 151 Chicago riots, 152 Chicago sit-ins, 154

1134

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Category Index

Chisholm’s election to Congress, 161 Church bombings, 169 Civil Rights movement, 204 Civil rights worker murders, 219 Civil War, 226 Clinton massacre, 233 Clotilde capture, 234 Colfax massacre, 239 Compromise of 1877, 248 Crown Heights conflicts, 268 Defense industry desegregation, 277 Draft riots, 298 Emancipation Proclamation, 323 Freedom Rides, 372 Freedom Summer, 374 Great Migration, 399 Greensboro sit-ins, 406 Hampton-Clark deaths, 424 Harlem Renaissance, 426 Harlins murder, 434 Harpers Ferry raid, 436 Hawkins murder, 441 “I Have a Dream” speech, 449 Jackson’s run for the presidency, 461 Journey of Reconciliation, 481 King assassination, 507 King beating case, 515 Little Rock school desegregation crisis, 544 Los Angeles riots, 548 Malcolm X assassination, 559 Marshall’s appointment to the Supreme Court, 564 Miami riots, 576 Military desegregation, 583 Million Man March, 593 Million Woman March, 597 Missouri Compromise, 606 Montgomery bus boycott, 614 MOVE bombing, 621 New York City slave revolt, 669 New York riots, 674

Newark riot, 677 Orangeburg massacre, 699 Poor People’s March on Washington, 725 Race riots of 1866, 737 Race riots of 1943, 741 Race riots of 1967, 745 Race riots of the twentieth century, 750 Reconstruction, 755 Scottsboro trials, 786 Selma-Montgomery march, 797 Simpson murder trial, 813 Slavery in Massachusetts, 865 Slavery in Virginia, 870 Stono Rebellion, 902 Summit Meeting of National Negro Leaders, 912 Thomas-Hill hearings, 928 Till lynching, 931 Turner’s slave insurrection, 933 Tuskegee experiment, 939 University of Mississippi desegregation, 974 Vietnam War, 979 Washington, D.C., riots, 997 Watts riot, 999 Wilder’s election to Virginia governorship, 1010 World War II, 1020 FAMILY ISSUES Agriculture, 32 Civil Rights movement and children, 214 Demographic trends, 283 Education, 315 Employment, 327 Equal Employment Opportunity Act of 1972, 331 Fair Housing Act, 342 Freedmen’s Bureau, 367 Million Woman March, 597 Miscegenation laws, 600 Moynihan Report, 623

Category Index National Black Women’s Political Leadership Caucus, 652 Roots, 767 School desegregation, 770 Segregation on the frontier, 793 Sharecropping, 806 Slavery, 826 Slavery and families, 835 Slavery and women, 858 Tuskegee experiment, 939 Underground Railroad, 947 JUSTICE SYSTEM Batson v. Kentucky, 90 Bolling v. Sharpe, 137 Brown v. Mississippi, 144 Edmonson v. Leesville Concrete Company, 314 Hampton-Clark deaths, 424 King beating case, 515 Los Angeles riots, 548 McCleskey v. Kemp, 557 Moore v. Dempsey, 619 MOVE bombing, 621 National Association for the Advancement of Colored People Legal Defense and Educational Fund, 643 Norris v. Alabama, 687 Powell v. Alabama, 727 Powers v. Ohio, 728 Scottsboro trials, 786 Simpson murder trial, 813 Slavery and the justice system, 850 Strauder v. West Virginia, 907 Till lynching, 931 United States v. Cruikshank, 959 Williams v. Mississippi, 1017 Wisconsin v. Mitchell, 1018 LABOR AND EMPLOYMENT Adarand Constructors v. Peña, 13 Affirmative action, 15 Agriculture, 32

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1135

Albemarle Paper Company v. Moody, 39 Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, 138 Civil Rights Act of 1964, 188 Civil Rights Act of 1991, 198 Cowboys, 267 Defense industry desegregation, 277 Economic trends, 304 Employment, 327 Equal Employment Opportunity Act of 1972, 331 Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, 338 Fair Employment Practices Committee, 340 Freedmen’s Bureau, 367 Fullilove v. Klutznick, 391 Great Migration, 399 Griggs v. Duke Power Company, 415 League of Revolutionary Black Workers, 530 Martin v. Wilks, 568 National Urban League, 659 Patterson v. McLean Credit Union, 702 Race riots of 1943, 741 Sharecropping, 806 Slavery, 826 Talented Tenth, 919 United Steelworkers of America v. Weber, 962 Universal Negro Improvement Association, 969 Washington v. Davis, 996 LAW ENFORCEMENT Charleston race riots, 151 Chicago riots, 152 Kerner Commission, 499 Ku Klux Klan Acts, 529 Los Angeles riots, 548 Lynching, 553

1136

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Category Index

Miami riots, 576 MOVE bombing, 621 New York riots, 674 Newark riot, 677 Orangeburg massacre, 699 Race riots of 1866, 737 Race riots of 1943, 741 Race riots of 1967, 745 Race riots of the twentieth century, 750 Simpson murder trial, 813 Slavery and the justice system, 850 Washington, D.C., riots, 997 Watts riot, 999 LAWS Antislavery laws of 1777 and 1807, 58 Black codes, 103 Civil Rights Act of 1866, 177 Civil Rights Act of 1957, 182 Civil Rights Act of 1960, 183 Civil Rights Act of 1964, 188 Civil Rights Act of 1968, 195 Civil Rights Act of 1991, 198 Civil Rights Acts of 1866-1875, 199 Civil Rights Restoration Act, 215 Compromise of 1850, 243 Confiscation Acts of 1861 and 1862, 249 Disfranchisement laws in Mississippi, 294 Dyer antilynching bill, 302 Equal Employment Opportunity Act of 1972, 331 Fair Housing Act, 342 Fifteenth Amendment, 347 Fourteenth Amendment, 357 Fugitive Slave Law of 1793, 382 Fugitive Slave Law of 1850, 387 Jim Crow laws, 476 Kansas-Nebraska Act, 490 Ku Klux Klan Acts, 529

Miscegenation laws, 600 Northwest Ordinance, 694 Slave codes, 821 Thirteenth Amendment, 922 Three-fifths compromise, 930 Twenty-fourth Amendment, 941 Voting Rights Act of 1965, 983 Voting Rights Act of 1975, 990 MEDIA Black Power movement, 129 Church bombings, 169 Cowboys, 267 Film history, 352 Harlem Renaissance, 426 Jackson’s run for the presidency, 461 King beating case, 515 Liberator, The, 532 Literature, 537 Little Rock school desegregation crisis, 544 Los Angeles riots, 548 Media, the, 569 Million Man March, 593 Million Woman March, 597 Music, 624 North Star, The, 689 Roots, 767 Simpson murder trial, 813 Stereotypes, 898 Thomas-Hill hearings, 928 MILITARY Brownsville incident, 145 Buffalo soldiers, 147 Civil War, 226 Confiscation Acts of 1861 and 1862, 249 Defense industry desegregation, 277 Draft riots, 298 Emancipation Proclamation, 323 Little Rock school desegregation crisis, 544

Category Index Military, 579 Military desegregation, 583 Native Americans and African Americans, 661 Reconstruction, 755 Tuskegee Airmen, 937 Vietnam War, 979 Watts riot, 999 World War II, 1020 MOB VIOLENCE Charleston race riots, 151 Chicago riots, 152 Church bombings, 169 Church burnings, 174 Civil Rights movement and children, 214 Civil rights worker murders, 219 Clinton massacre, 233 Colfax massacre, 239 Crown Heights conflicts, 268 Draft riots, 298 Dyer antilynching bill, 302 Freedom Rides, 372 Hawkins murder, 441 Kerner Commission, 499 King assassination, 507 King beating case, 515 Ku Klux Klan, 523 Ku Klux Klan Acts, 529 Los Angeles riots, 548 Lynching, 553 Miami riots, 576 MOVE bombing, 621 National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders, 635 New York riots, 674 Newark riot, 677 Orangeburg massacre, 699 R.A.V. v. City of St. Paul, 735 Race riots of 1866, 737 Race riots of 1943, 741 Race riots of 1967, 745 Race riots of the twentieth century, 750

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1137

Till lynching, 931 United States v. Cruikshank, 959 University of Mississippi desegregation, 974 Washington, D.C., riots, 997 Watts riot, 999 ORGANIZATIONS African Methodist Episcopal Church, 26 African Methodist Episcopal Zion Churches, 30 American Anti-Slavery Society, 42 American Colonization Society, 46 Ashmun Institute, 62 Baptist Church, 78 Black cabinet, 94 Black Christian Nationalist Movement, 95 Black Panther Party, 123 Black United Students, 132 Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, 138 Colored Women’s League, 240 Combahee River Collective, 241 Congress of Racial Equality, 250 Congressional Black Caucus, 256 Council of Federated Organizations, 260 Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, 338 Fair Employment Practices Committee, 340 Free African Society, 362 Freedmen’s Bureau, 367 Freemasons in Boston, 377 Kerner Commission, 499 Ku Klux Klan, 523 League of Revolutionary Black Workers, 530 Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party, 603 Nation of Islam, 631

1138

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Category Index

National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders, 635 National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, 636 National Association for the Advancement of Colored People Legal Defense and Educational Fund, 643 National Association of Colored Women, 651 National Black Women’s Political Leadership Caucus, 652 National Coalition of Blacks for Reparations in America, 653 National Council of Colored People, 654 National Council of Negro Women, 658 National Urban League, 659 Negro Conventions, 667 Niagara Movement, 681 Pennsylvania Society for the Abolition of Slavery, 703 President’s Committee on Civil Rights, 729 Rainbow Coalition, 753 Republic of New Africa, 765 Southern Christian Leadership Conference, 879 Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, 908 United Negro College Fund, 953 United States Commission on Civil Rights, 954 Universal Negro Improvement Association, 969 White Citizens’ Councils, 1007 PAN-AFRICANISM African Liberation Day, 25 Afrocentrism, 31 Black nationalism, 118 Music, 624 Nation of Islam, 631

Pan-Africanism, 701 Republic of New Africa, 765 Universal Negro Improvement Association, 969 West Indians, 1002 PEOPLES Black Jews, 115 Cubans and African Americans, 270 Demographic trends, 283 Free blacks, 366 Haitians, 421 Irish-African American relations, 460 Jamaicans, 466 Jews and African Americans, 470 Koreans and African Americans, 520 Native Americans and African Americans, 661 One-drop rule, 698 West Indians, 1002 POLITICS AND GOVERNMENT Black cabinet, 94 Black codes, 103 Black Panther Party, 123 Chisholm’s election to Congress, 161 Civil War, 226 Compromise of 1850, 243 Compromise of 1877, 248 Congressional Black Caucus, 256 Disfranchisement laws in Mississippi, 294 Emancipation Proclamation, 323 Fourteenth Amendment, 357 Gerrymandering, 393 Gomillion v. Lightfoot, 397 Grovey v. Townsend, 418 Harper v. Virginia Board of Elections, 435 Jackson’s run for the presidency, 461

Category Index Kansas-Nebraska Act, 490 Lassiter v. Northampton County Board of Elections, 530 Marshall’s appointment to the Supreme Court, 564 Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party, 603 Missouri Compromise, 606 Mobile v. Bolden, 613 MOVE bombing, 621 National Black Women’s Political Leadership Caucus, 652 Newberry v. United States, 679 Nixon v. Condon, 685 Nixon v. Herndon, 686 Northwest Ordinance, 694 Politics and government, 713 Poll taxes, 723 President’s Committee on Civil Rights, 729 Rainbow Coalition, 753 Reconstruction, 755 Republic of New Africa, 765 Shaw v. Hunt, 808 Shaw v. Reno, 810 Smith v. Allwright, 875 Southern Manifesto, 887 Summit Meeting of National Negro Leaders, 912 Thirteenth Amendment, 922 Thomas-Hill hearings, 928 Three-fifths compromise, 930 Twenty-fourth Amendment, 941 Understanding tests, 952 United States Commission on Civil Rights, 954 United States v. Classic, 958 United States v. Reese, 961 Voting Rights Act of 1965, 983 Voting Rights Act of 1975, 990 White primaries, 1009 Wilder’s election to Virginia governorship, 1010 Yarbrough, Ex parte, 1025

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1139

POPULAR CULTURE Anderson’s Lincoln Memorial concert, 51 Baseball’s racial integration, 82 Black Is Beautiful movement, 114 Black nationalism, 118 Cowboys, 267 Film history, 352 Harlem Renaissance, 426 Literature, 537 Media, the, 569 Music, 624 Roots, 767 Sports, 889 Stereotypes, 898 RACE RELATIONS Atlanta Compromise, 67 Black Jews, 115 Charleston race riots, 151 Chicago riots, 152 Congress of Racial Equality, 250 Cubans and African Americans, 270 Draft riots, 298 Haitians, 421 Harlins murder, 434 “I Have a Dream” speech, 449 Integration, 454 Irish-African American relations, 460 Jamaicans, 466 Jews and African Americans, 470 Koreans and African Americans, 520 Los Angeles riots, 548 Miami riots, 576 Native Americans and African Americans, 661 New York riots, 674 Newark riot, 677 Poor People’s March on Washington, 725 Race riots of 1866, 737 Race riots of 1943, 741

1140

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Category Index

Race riots of 1967, 745 Race riots of the twentieth century, 750 Rainbow Coalition, 753 Slavery and race relations, 843 United States Commission on Civil Rights, 954 Washington, D.C., riots, 997 Watts riot, 999 West Indians, 1002 RACISM Clinton massacre, 233 Colfax massacre, 239 Hawkins murder, 441 Jim Crow laws, 476 Kerner Commission, 499 Ku Klux Klan, 523 Ku Klux Klan Acts, 529 Lynching, 553 One-drop rule, 698 Proslavery argument, 731 Tuskegee experiment, 939 White Citizens’ Councils, 1007 RECONSTRUCTION Charleston race riots, 151 Compromise of 1877, 248 Fifteenth Amendment, 347 Fourteenth Amendment, 357 Freedmen’s Bureau, 367 Ku Klux Klan Acts, 529 Poll taxes, 723 Race riots of 1866, 737 Reconstruction, 755 Slaughterhouse Cases, 819 RELIGION Abolition, 1 African Methodist Episcopal Church, 26 African Methodist Episcopal Zion Churches, 30 Baptist Church, 78

Black Christian Nationalist Movement, 95 Black church, 97 Black Jews, 115 “Black Manifesto,” 117 Church bombings, 169 Church burnings, 174 Free African Society, 362 Jews and African Americans, 470 Nation of Islam, 631 Southern Christian Leadership Conference, 879 SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY Ashmun Institute, 62 Atlanta Compromise, 67 Black colleges and universities, 107 One-drop rule, 698 Science and technology, 776 Tuskegee experiment, 939 SEGREGATION Birmingham March, 91 Black codes, 103 Black Power movement, 129 Buchanan v. Warley, 147 Burton v. Wilmington Parking Authority, 150 Civil Rights Act of 1968, 195 Evans v. Abney, 340 Gerrymandering, 393 Heart of Atlanta Motel v. United States, 442 Integration, 454 Jim Crow laws, 476 Katzenbach v. McClung, 496 Louisville, New Orleans, and Texas Railway Company v. Mississippi, 552 McLaurin v. Oklahoma State Regents for Higher Education, 558 Military, 579 Missouri ex rel. Gaines v. Canada, 612

Category Index Palmer v. Thompson, 700 Plessy v. Ferguson, 708 Restrictive covenants, 766 Segregation, 790 Segregation on the frontier, 793 Separate but equal doctrine, 805 Shelley v. Kraemer, 812 SLAVE REVOLTS Amistad slave revolt, 47 Fugitive Slave Law of 1793, 382 Fugitive Slave Law of 1850, 387 New York City slave revolt, 669 Slavery, 826 Stono Rebellion, 902 Turner’s slave insurrection, 933 Underground Railroad, 947 SLAVE TRADE Amistad slave revolt, 47 Antislavery laws of 1777 and 1807, 58 Clotilde capture, 234 Groves v. Slaughter, 417 Pennsylvania Society for the Abolition of Slavery, 703 Slavery, 826 SLAVERY Abolition, 1 Abolitionist movement and women, 5 Agriculture, 32 American Anti-Slavery Society, 42 American Colonization Society, 46 Amistad slave revolt, 47 Antislavery laws of 1777 and 1807, 58 “Black Manifesto,” 117 Bleeding Kansas, 134 Civil War, 226 Compromise of 1850, 243 Confiscation Acts of 1861 and 1862, 249

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1141

Economic trends, 304 Emancipation Proclamation, 323 Fugitive Slave Law of 1793, 382 Fugitive Slave Law of 1850, 387 Groves v. Slaughter, 417 Kansas-Nebraska Act, 490 Missouri Compromise, 606 Native Americans and African Americans, 661 New York City slave revolt, 669 Northwest Ordinance, 694 Pennsylvania Society for the Abolition of Slavery, 703 Proslavery argument, 731 Roots, 767 Scott v. Sandford, 783 Slave codes, 821 Slavery, 826 Slavery and families, 835 Slavery and race relations, 843 Slavery and the justice system, 850 Slavery and women, 858 Slavery in Massachusetts, 865 Slavery in Virginia, 870 Stono Rebellion, 902 Thirteenth Amendment, 922 Three-fifths compromise, 930 Turner’s slave insurrection, 933 Underground Railroad, 947 SPORTS Baseball’s racial integration, 82 Simpson murder trial, 813 Sports, 889 Stereotypes, 898 URBANIZATION Black flight, 112 Chicago riots, 152 Chicago sit-ins, 154 Crown Heights conflicts, 268 Cubans and African Americans, 270 Demographic trends, 283

1142

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Category Index

Evans v. Abney, 340 Fair Housing Act, 342 Free blacks, 366 National Urban League, 659 New York riots, 674 Newark riot, 677 Race riots of 1943, 741 Race riots of 1967, 745 Race riots of the twentieth century, 750 Universal Negro Improvement Association, 969 Washington, D.C., riots, 997 Watts riot, 999 VOTING RIGHTS Black codes, 103 Civil Rights Act of 1960, 183 Civil Rights Act of 1964, 188 Council of Federated Organizations, 260 Disfranchisement laws in Mississippi, 294 Fifteenth Amendment, 347 Freedom Summer, 374 Gerrymandering, 393 Gomillion v. Lightfoot, 397 Grandfather clauses, 398 Grovey v. Townsend, 418 Guinn v. United States, 419 Harper v. Virginia Board of Elections, 435 Lassiter v. Northampton County Board of Elections, 530 Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party, 603 Mobile v. Bolden, 613 Newberry v. United States, 679 Nixon v. Condon, 685 Nixon v. Herndon, 686 Politics and government, 713 Poll taxes, 723

Rainbow Coalition, 753 Selma-Montgomery march, 797 Shaw v. Hunt, 808 Shaw v. Reno, 810 Smith v. Allwright, 875 Terry v. Adams, 921 Three-fifths compromise, 930 Twenty-fourth Amendment, 941 Understanding tests, 952 United States Commission on Civil Rights, 954 United States v. Classic, 958 United States v. Reese, 961 Voting Rights Act of 1965, 983 Voting Rights Act of 1975, 990 White primaries, 1009 Wilder’s election to Virginia governorship, 1010 Yarbrough, Ex parte, 1025 WOMEN’S ISSUES Abolitionist movement and women, 5 Anderson’s Lincoln Memorial concert, 51 Chisholm’s election to Congress, 161 Colored Women’s League, 240 Combahee River Collective, 241 Million Woman March, 597 Miscegenation laws, 600 National Association of Colored Women, 651 National Black Women’s Political Leadership Caucus, 652 National Council of Negro Women, 658 Slavery and families, 835 Slavery and women, 858 Thomas-Hill hearings, 928 Underground Railroad, 947

Personages Index Abbott, Benjamin, 363 Abbott, Robert S., 288, 309, 400-401 Abdullah Al-Amin, Jamil (H. Rap Brown), 1100 Abel, I. W., 746 Abernathy, Ralph, 616, 800, 881, 1096; and Poor People’s March on Washington, 726 Abrahams, Peter, 430 Africa, John (Vincent Leapheart), 621 Ali, Muhammad, 895, 901, 1096; and military conscription, 982 Allen, Richard, 26-27, 44, 98, 363, 655, 1096 Amos, James Ralston, 64 Anderson, Jack, 254 Anderson, Joe, 777 Anderson, Marian, 51-58, 1096 Angelou, Maya, 595, 1097 Anthony, Susan B., 927 Aristide, Jean-Bertrand, 422 Armstrong, Louis, 429 Asante, Molefi Kete, 31-32, 318, 1097 Ashe, Arthur, 895 Ashmun, Jehudi, 64 Atchison, David R., 492 Attucks, Crispus, 277, 663 Bailey, F. Lee, 815 Baird, Absalom, 740 Baker, Ella Jo, 206, 411, 881, 908 Baker, Josephine, 1097 Bakke, Alan, 18, 71-78 Baldwin, James, 431, 542, 1098 Baliles, Gerald L., 1011 Banneker, Benjamin, 44, 777 Baraka, Amiri, 1098 Bargonetti, Jill, 781 Barnett, Ferdinand L., 1124 Barnett, Ross, 975, 978 Bates, Daisy, 215 Batt, John, 378 Beecher, Catharine, 864 Bell, Alexander Graham, 779

Berry, Mary Francis, 594 Bethune, Mary McLeod, 94, 658, 1098 Biden, Joseph, 929 Bidwell, Barnabas, 61 Black, Hugo L., 700, 921, 975; and Ku Klux Klan, 526 Blackwell, David, 780 Blair, Henry, 778 Blueford, Guion, 781 Bond, Julian, 1099; and King, Martin Luther, Jr., 1099 Booth, John Wilkes, 1114 Booth, Sherman M., 854 Bowlegs, Billy, 665 Bowlegs, Jim, 665 Boxill, Bernard R., 457, 459 Bradley, Ed, 574 Bradley, Joseph P., 203, 820 Bradley, Stephen R., 61 Bradley, Thomas, 517, 1099 Bradstreet, Simon, 868 Brady, Tom, 1007 Braun, Carol Moseley, 1099 Brawley, Tawana, 1121 Breckenridge, Calvin, 414 Brennan, William J., 506 Brewer, David J.; Louisville, New Orleans, and Texas Railway Company v. Mississippi, 552 Breyer, Stephen G.; and affirmative action, 23 Brooke, Edward W., 343, 746, 1014, 1100 Brown, H. Rap, 909, 1100 Brown, Henry “Box,” 949 Brown, James, 1121 Brown, Jim, 901 Brown, John, 135, 436-441, 924, 1100 Brown, Oliver, 215 Brown, Ron, 754 Brown, Tony, 574 Brown, William Wells, 951 Bruce, Blanche K., 241, 717, 1100 Bruce, Josephine B., 241

1144

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Personages Index

Bryan, Andrew, 79 Buchanan, Bessie, 162 Buchanan, James, 134, 136 Bull, William, 904 Bunche, Ralph, 1100 Burger, Warren, 414, 416, 915 Burr, Aaron, 60 Burton, LeVar, 768 Bush, George, 1119; and affirmative action, 22; and civil rights, 199; and Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, 339; and Haitians, 423; and Supreme Court, 928; and Thomas, Clarence, 1121 Bush, George W., 722, 1119 Butler, Pierce, 728 Byrd, Harry, 773 Calhoun, John C., 246 Callahan, William W., 788 Caplan, Lincoln, 22 Cardozo, Benjamin N.; Nixon v. Condon, 685 Carmichael, Stokely, 124, 127, 129130, 212, 375, 473, 501, 909, 1004, 1101; and Vietnam War, 981 Carter, Jimmy, 257, 965, 1109, 1126 Carter, John Pym, 64 Cary, Mary Ann Shadd, 10 Cato, Gavin, 269 Cavanagh, Jerome, 746 Champion, James, 26 Chaney, James Earl, 219-225, 254, 263, 375, 472, 908 Charleston, Oscar, 891 Chase, Salmon, 494 Chavis, Benjamin, 593-597, 639, 1101 Chesnut, Mary Boykin, 861 Chionesu, Philé, 597-600 Chisholm, Shirley, 161-168, 465, 721, 1004, 1101 Clark, Marcia, 814 Clark, Mark, 424-426 Clay, Henry, 46, 244, 246 Cleage, Albert, 96 Cleaver, Eldridge, 127-128, 1102; and Vietnam War, 981

Cleveland, Grover, 69 Clinton, Bill, 23, 1097; and church burnings, 176; and Haitians, 423; and Jackson, Jesse, 754; and Jordan, Vernon, 1111 Cochran, Johnnie, 815 Coffin, Levi, 950 Coleman, Marshall, 1014 Colmer, William, 186 Condon, James, 876 Cone, James, 1102 Coney, Asia, 597-600 Connell, Pat, 574 Conner, Eugene “Bull,” 92 Conyers, John, 1117 Cook, Coralie Franklin, 241 Cook, John T., 240 Coolidge, Calvin, 1106 Cooper, Jack, 572 Corman, James C., 746 Cornish, Samuel, 571 Coronado, Francisco Vásquez de, 662 Cosby, Bill, 1102 Court, Gus, 261 Craft, William and Ellen, 949 Crandall, Prudence, 5 Cresson, Sarah Emlen, 63 Crummell, Alexander, 1102 Cuffe, Paul, 118, 663 Cuffee, 671 Cullen, Countée, 427, 432 Curry, John Stuart, 438 Danforth, John C., 218 Darden, Christopher, 814 Davis, Angela, 1103 Davis, Benjamin O., Jr., 938, 1022, 1103 Davis, Benjamin O., Sr., 581, 1020, 1103 Davis, Billy, 1107 Davis, Jefferson, 228, 246, 301 Davis, Ossie, 573 Day, William R.; Buchanan v. Warley, 147 Dees, Morris, 528 Delany, Martin Robison, 1103 Dellums, Ronald, 167

Personages Index Dennis, David, 261 Denny, Reginald, 550 DePriest, Oscar, 718 Dew, Thomas R., 732 Dickey, John Miller, 63 Dickinson, Jonathan, 706 Diop, Cheikh Anta, 32 Dirksen, Everett M., 186, 190, 196, 344 Dixon, Thomas, 900 Douglas, Stephen A., 134, 247, 491, 1113 Douglas, William O.; Lassiter v. Northampton County Board of Elections, 530 Douglass, Frederick, 3, 44, 367, 538, 656, 663, 689, 832, 924, 951, 1103, 1124; and Garrison, William Lloyd, 690; and The North Star, 689-693; and Thirteenth Amendment, 925; and Truth, Sojourner, 11 D’Souza, Dinesh, 1002 Du Bois, W. E. B., 70, 108, 119, 317, 400, 570, 637, 1104; and Niagara Movement, 501, 682; and PanAfricanism, 701-702; and “Talented Tenth,” 919-921; and United Nations, 587; and Washington, Booker T., 1124; writings of, 539 Dukakis, Michael, 1110 Duke, David, 527 Dunbar, Paul Laurence, 540 Dyer, L. C., 303 Eastland, James O., 186, 942, 993 Edmundson, William, 705 Eisenhower, Dwight D., 588, 912, 1104; and Anderson, Marian, 55, 57; and civil rights, 882; and Civil Rights Act of 1960, 184; and Little Rock school desegregation crisis, 259, 544-548, 774; and military segregation, 589; and Summit Meeting of National Negro Leaders, 912-913; and Warren, Earl, 1123; and World War II, 1023 Eisenstein, Zillah, 242

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1145

Elder, Lee, 896 Ellington, Duke, 428, 572 Ellison, Ralph, 431, 542 Ervin, Sam, 197, 962 Evers, Medgar, 170, 450, 1105 Fard, W. D., 631-632, 1116 Farmer, James, 163, 372, 481, 1105, 1120 Farrakhan, Louis, 121, 257, 634, 1105; and Jackson, Jesse, 464, 1105; and Jews, 474; and Malcolm X, 1105; and the media, 594; and Million Man March, 593-597 Faubus, Orval, 258-259, 544-548, 774 Fernando, 870 Ferraro, Geraldine, 465 Field, Stephen J., 820 Fillmore, Millard, 246 Fitzgerald, Ella, 428 Fitzhugh, George, 734, 830 Foraker, Joseph B., 146 Forman, James, 911 Forten, James, 26, 534, 1105 Forten, James, Jr., 778 Fortune, T. Thomas, 306, 1106; and Washington, Booker T., 1106 Foster, Bill, 236 Foster, Stephen, 626 Fox, George, 704 Frankfurter, Felix, 397, 921 Franklin, Benjamin, 378, 704, 922 Franklin, Raymond S., 845 Frazier, Demita, 242 Frederickson, George, 844 Frémont, John C., 247 Gandhi, Mohandas K., 154, 251, 407, 481, 508, 1106; and King, Martin Luther, Jr., 1106 Garnet, Henry Highland, 951 Garrettson, Freeborn, 363 Garrison, William Lloyd, 2, 5, 9, 42, 832, 853, 863, 935, 1106; and Douglass, Frederick, 690; and The Liberator, 532-537; opponents of, 732; and Thirteenth Amendment, 925 Garvey, Marcus, 115, 120, 403, 467,

1146

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Personages Index

632, 640, 969-974, 1004, 1106; and Malcolm X, 1115; and PanAfricanism, 701; and Washington, Booker T., 970 Gates, Daryl, 517, 548 Geary, John W., 135 George, David, 79 George, Walter, 888 Geronimo, 148 Gerry, Elbridge, 394 Gibson, Josh, 891 Giddings, Doras, 364 Ginsburg, Ruth Bader; and affirmative action, 23 Glazer, Nathan, 455, 458 Goetz, Bernhard, 1121 Goldman, Ronald, 814 Goldwater, Barry, 223 Gonzales, Pancho, 895 Goode, Mal, 574 Goode, Wilson, 622 Goodell, William, 853 Goodman, Andrew, 219-225, 263, 375, 472, 908 Gorbachev, Mikhail, 1119 Gordy, Berry, Jr., 1107 Gordy, Gwen, 1107 Gore, Al, 722 Gourdine, Meredith, 781 Grace, Charles Emmanuel “Sweet Daddy,” 1107 Granger, Lester B., 660, 912 Grant, Ulysses S., 240, 529, 759; and civil rights, 201 Graves, Earl, 1005, 1107 Green, Charles, 240 Greenberg, Jack, 645, 648 Griffith, D. W., 900 Grimké, Angelina, 8, 861 Grimké, Charlotte Forten, 240 Grimké, Sarah, 8, 861 Grovey, Richard Randolph, 876 Gumbel, Bryant, 574 Hale, John P., 491 Haley, Alex, 539, 767-768, 1107 Hall, Prince, 377-381 Hamer, Fannie Lou, 101, 1108

Hamilton, Alexander, 60, 707 Hammond, James Henry, 733 Hampton, Fred, 424-426 Hampton, Wade, 151, 717 Hannah, Marc, 780 Harding, Warren, 302 Harlan, John M., 271, 480, 764, 791 Harlins, Latasha, 434, 522 Harper, Frances Ellen Watkins, 10 Harris, Bernard, 781 Harris, Fred R., 500 Harrison, Pat, 303 Harrison, Thomas, 704 Hart, Gary, 462 Hastie, William, 94, 1020 Hawkins, Yusuf, 441-442 Hayden, Lewis, 951 Hayes, George E. C., 645 Hayes, Rutherford B., 248-249, 717, 755, 1108 Henderson, Fletcher, 428 Henry, Aaron, 260 Higginson, Thomas Wentworth, 437 Hill, Anita, 928-930, 1108, 1121 Hill, Larry, 176 Hilliard, Asa, 32 Hitler, Adolf, 1116 Holder, Eric, 1004 Holland, Spessard L., 942-943 Holmes, Oliver Wendell; Moore v. Dempsey, 619 Holmes, Oliver Wendell, Jr., 875 Hooker, John Lee, 628 Hooks, Benjamin, 574, 639, 1108 Hoover, Herbert, 1098 Hoover, J. Edgar, 127; and civil rights worker murders, 222; and urban rioting, 998 Hopkins, Pauline E., 541 Houser, George M., 481 Houston, Charles, 812 Howard, Oliver Otis, 1109 Howe, Julia Ward, 862, 927 Howe, Samuel Gridley, 437 Hughes, Charles Evans; Brown v. Mississippi, 144; Missouri ex rel. Gaines v. Canada, 612; Norris v. Alabama, 688

Personages Index Hughes, Henry, 734, 844 Hughes, Langston, 65, 403, 427, 431, 541, 1109 Hughes, Richard J., 678 Humphrey, Hubert H., 189, 965 Hunter, Robert, 671-672 Hurston, Zora Neale, 430, 543, 1114, 1123 Imes, Elmer Samuel, 780 Innis, Roy, 251, 1109 Ito, Judge Lance, 814 Jackson, Andrew; and Seminole Wars, 665 Jackson, Jesse, 474, 1109; and Chicago riots, 153; and Clinton, Bill, 754; and Democratic Party, 754; and Farrakhan, Louis, 464, 1105; and Korean Americans, 521; presidential candidacy, 461-466; and Rainbow Coalition, 753-754; and Reagan, Ronald, 462-463 Jackson, Jimmie Lee, 799 Jackson, Mahalia, 628 Jacob, John, 661 Jay, John, 60, 707 Jefferson, Thomas; and Northwest Ordinance, 694; and slavery, 61 Jeffries, Edward J., 744 Jemison, T. J., 881 Jenkins, Herbert, 746 Jenkins, Howard, 645 Jennings, Thomas L., 778 Johnson, Andrew, 103, 178, 218, 361, 1110; and civil rights, 200-201, 756; impeachment of, 180, 926; and Reconstruction, 103, 106, 179180, 357, 371, 714, 738, 755, 926; and Stevens, Thaddeus, 1121 Johnson, Andrew (student), 484 Johnson, Frank M., 801 Johnson, Jack, 894, 1110 Johnson, James Weldon, 1110 Johnson, John H., 571, 1111 Johnson, Lyndon B., 182, 1111; and affirmative action, 15, 71, 962; and civil rights, 189, 195, 343, 888;

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1147

and Civil Rights Act of 1964, 191; and Kerner Commission, 499-506; and King, Martin Luther, Jr., 189; and Ku Klux Klan, 527; and Marshall, Thurgood, 567; and riots, 211, 676, 678, 751; and Selma-Montgomery march, 800802; and Vietnam War, 981; and voting rights, 799, 985, 990 Johnston, Samuel, 383 Jones, Absalom, 26, 98, 363, 366, 1111 Jones, Elaine, 648 Jones, Jane Elizabeth, 10 Jones, LeRoi (Amiri Baraka), 1098 Jones, Quincy, 629 Joplin, Scott, 627 Jordan, Vernon E., Jr., 661, 1111 Joseph, Chief, 1109 Julian, Percy, 780 Just, Ernest, 780 Karenga, Ron, 114 Katzenbach, Nicholas, 985 Keith, George, 705 Kelly, Harry F., 744 Kennedy, Anthony M., 315, 728 Kennedy, John F., 1111; assassination of, 189, 562; and Birmingham March, 92-93; and civil rights, 183, 189, 332, 343, 444, 451, 499, 720, 910; and Malcolm X, 634; and Marshall, Thurgood, 648; and Meredith, James, 976 Kennedy, Robert F., 222, 1107, 1112; and civil rights, 499; and Meredith, James, 975 Kennedy, Ted, 217 Kenyatta, Jomo, 701 Kerner, Otto, 153, 500, 635, 746, 998 Key, Elizabeth, 870 King, Don, 1121 King, Martin Luther, Jr., 101, 209, 473, 616, 908, 912, 1112; assassination of, 196; and Birmingham March, 91-94; and Bond, Julian, 1099; and Gandhi, Mohandas K., 1106; “I Have a Dream” speech, 449-454, 509; and

1148

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Personages Index

Johnson, Lyndon B., 189; “Letter from Birmingham Jail,” 92, 209, 450, 978; and Malcolm X, 799; and the media, 251; and Poor People’s March on Washington, 726; and Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, 411; and Vietnam War, 212, 981; and Watts riot, 1001; and Young, Andrew, 1126 King, Rodney, 515-519, 522, 548, 752, 816, 1113 King, Rufus, 608 Koon, Stacey, 516, 549 Kozol, Jonathan, 457 Kunta Kinte, 767-768, 1107 Latimer, Lewis Henry, 779 Lawrence, Robert, 781 Leaphart, Vincent, 621 Lee, George, 261 Lee, Robert E., 301 Lee, Spike, 355, 1113 LeFlore, John, 742 Leibowitz, Samuel, 789 L’Enfant, Pierre, 777 Levison, Stanley, 881, 883 Lewis, John, 253 Lewis, Monroe, 240 Liele, George, 79 Lincoln, Abraham, 247, 862, 1113; assassination of, 926; and Civil War, 227, 298-302; Emancipation Proclamation, 323-326; and Reconstruction, 177; and slavery, 250, 323-326 Lincoln, C. Eric, 98 Lindsay, John V., 500 Liuzzo, Viola Lee, 527 Locke, Alain, 1114 Logan, James, 706 Lopez, Narcisco, 490 Louis, Joe, 894-895, 901 Lowery, Joseph E., 881, 1114 Lowry, Robert, 295 McCormick, Cyrus, 777 McCoy, Elijah, 778 McCullough, William M., 746

McDuffie, Arthur, 752 McKay, Claude, 427, 432, 467, 1004, 1114 McKissick, Floyd, 1115 McNair, Ronald, 781 McReynolds, James C., 728 Maddox, Alton, 270 Madikizela-Mandela, Winnie, 1094 Malcolm X, 121, 124, 129, 539, 559, 633, 1115; assassination of, 559564, 1116; and civil rights, 190; and Farrakhan, Louis, 1105; and Haley, Alex, 1107; and Kennedy, John F., 634; and King, Martin Luther, Jr., 799; and the media, 562 Malone, Annie Turnbo, 779 Mamiya, Lawrence H., 98 Mandela, Nelson, 275 Manley, Norman, 701 Mann, Woodrow, 546, 774 Mansfield, Michael H., 942 Margold, Nathan, 771 Marrant, John, 379 Marshall, Thurgood, 13, 65, 641, 644, 771, 792, 812, 918, 1115; appointed to Supreme Court, 564-568; and Johnson, Lyndon B., 1111; retirement of, 928 Martinet, Louis, 709 Mary, Alexander A., 709 Mason, James, 388 Matney, William C., Jr., 574 Matthew, Wentworth Arthur, 115 May, Samuel, 42 Mays, Benjamin, 508 Mays, Willie, 901 Meagher, Timothy, 236 Meredith, James H., 129, 375, 646, 974-979, 1115 Mfume, Kweisi, 1093, 1095 Micheaux, Oscar, 353 Miller, Samuel F., 819 Mitchell, Arthur W., 718-719 Mitchell, Clarence, 195 Mitchell, Parren, 167 Mitchell, William H., 951 Monagas, Lionel, 573

Personages Index Mondale, Walter F., 343, 462-465 Monroe, James, 610 Morley, Burton R., 742 Morrison, Toni, 542-543, 1116 Moses, Robert, 261 Motley, Constance Baker, 646, 1004 Mott, Lucretia, 8 Moynihan, Daniel Patrick, 468, 623, 845 Muhammad, Elijah, 120, 539, 631635, 1116; and Malcolm X, 559564, 1115 Muhammad, Warith “Wallace,” 634 Murray, Anna, 689 Murray, Anna E., 241 Murrow, Edward R., 573 Nabrit, James M., Jr., 645 Nasser, Gamal Abdel, 701 Neville, Dinah, 704 Newton, Huey P., 121, 124, 132, 1116 Nixon, L. A., 875 Nixon, Richard M.; and Chisholm, Shirley, 165-166; and Congressional Black Caucus, 256, 721; and school desegregation, 40 Nkrumah, Kwame, 701, 1101, 1104 Norris, Isaac, 706 Nott, Josiah, 734, 829 Oglethorpe, James, 904 O’Neill, Eugene, 139, 1119 Owen, Robert Dale, 924 Owens, Jesse, 1116 Padmore, George, 701 Paige, Satchel, 891 Paine, Thomas, 707 Pánfilo de Narváez, 662 Parker, Theodore, 437 Parks, Rosa, 101, 209, 615-616, 1117 Patterson, Frederick D., 953, 1117 Patterson, Mary Jane, 241 Patterson, Orlando, 826, 845 Patterson, Robert B., 1007 Payne, Daniel Alexander, 1117 Payton, Philip A., Jr., 402 Peden, Katherine Graham, 746

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1149

Pemberton, Israel, 704 Pemberton, James, 704 Pennington, James, 655 Person, Waverly, 781 Peters, Brock, 354 Phillips, Wendell, 535, 832, 924 Pickering, William, 608 Picket, Bill, 268 Pierce, Franklin, 134, 490, 494 Pilmore, Joseph, 366 Pinchback, P. B. S., 716, 1014 Plessy, Homer Adolph, 709 Poitier, Sidney, 354, 1004 Powell, Adam Clayton, 130 Powell, Adam Clayton, Jr., 1117 Powell, Colin, 582, 1003, 1118; and Vietnam War, 982 Powell, Isaac, 781 Powell, James, 674 Powell, Laurence, 516 Powell, Lewis F., Jr., 19; Batson v. Kentucky, 90; McCleskey v. Kemp, 557 Price, Hugh, 661 Purvis, Robert, 951 Purvis, W. B., 779 Rainey, Ma, 431 Randolph, A. Philip, 139, 279-280, 341, 450, 587, 719, 912, 1118; and March on Washington movement, 1020 Rayburn, Sam, 888 Read, George, 383 Reagan, Ronald; and affirmative action, 22; and civil rights, 218, 957; and Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, 339; and Haitians, 423; and Jackson, Jesse, 462-463; and Powell, Colin, 1118 Redding, Louis, 645 Reed, Ishmael, 543 Rehnquist, William H., 1019; Martin v. Wilks, 568; Moose Lodge v. Irvis, 620; Shaw v. Hunt, 809 Revels, Hiram R., 717, 926 Reynolds, Grant, 279

1150

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Personages Index

Reynolds, Humphrey, 779 Rice, Condoleezza, 1118-1119 Rice, Thomas D. “Big Daddy,” 476 Rickey, Branch, 82-90 Rillieux, Norbert, 778 Robb, Charles S., 1011 Roberts, Owen J., 876 Robeson, Paul, 572, 892, 1119 Robinson, Elizabeth, 8 Robinson, Jackie, 82-90, 892, 1024, 1119 Robinson, Spotswood W., III, 645 Rodgers, Jonathan, 574 Romney, George, 747 Roosevelt, Eleanor, 94 Roosevelt, Franklin D., 278, 341, 746, 1120; and Bethune, Mary McLeod, 1099; and black cabinet, 94; and Davis, Benjamin O., Sr., 1103; and the Depression, 35; desegregation of defense industries, 277-283; election of, 719; and military segregation, 585; and World War II, 1020 Roosevelt, Theodore, 1124; and Brownsville incident, 145-146; in Spanish-American War, 149 Rush, Benjamin, 365, 704, 922 Russell, Richard B., 186, 942-944 Russwurm, John B., 571 Rustin, Bayard, 155, 450, 481-490, 881-882, 1120 Sacagawea, 664 Sackler, Howard, 1110 Sanborn, Franklin B., 437 Schwerner, Michael Henry, 219-225, 254, 263, 375, 472, 908 Scott, Dred, 783-786, 1120 Scott, Winfield, 490 Screvane, Paul, 676 Seale, Bobby, 121, 124, 1116, 1121 Sedgwick, Theodore, 383 Seymour, Horatio, 301 Shabazz, El-Hajj Malik El- (Malcolm X), 1115 Sharpe, John, 671 Sharpton, Al, 270, 1121 Shelton, Robert, 527

Shores family, 796 Shuttlesworth, Fred, 881 Simmons, William J., 525 Simpson, Nicole Brown, 814 Simpson, O. J., 768, 813-818 Smith, Barbara, 242 Smith, Bessie, 428, 431 Smith, Beverly, 242 Smith, Gerrit, 437, 692, 853 Smith, James McCune, 655 Smith, Lamar, 261 Soto, Hernando de, 662 Sowell, Thomas, 456, 468, 1002 Sparks, Chauncey, 742 Spingarn, Joel E., 638, 640 Stanton, Edwin McMasters, 300 Stanton, Elizabeth Cady, 927 Stanton, Frederick P., 135 Stearns, George Luther, 437 Steele, Charles Kenzie, 881 Steele, Shelby, 848 Steinberg, Stephen, 468 Stephens, Alexander, 494 Stevens, Thaddeus, 1121 Stewart, Potter, 414, 480; Mobile v. Bolden, 613 Stokes, Carl B., 721 Stone, John M., 295 Stone, Lucy, 8, 10, 927 Stoneman, George, 739 Stowe, Harriet Beecher, 862 Stringfellow, Thornton, 733 Sumner, Charles, 201, 494 Sutherland, George; Powell v. Alabama, 728 Taft, William Howard, 1124 Taney, Roger Brooke, 417 Tapisco, Jacob, 26 Tappan, Arthur, 42, 535 Taylor, Zachary, 246 Temple, Lewis, 778 Terrell, Mary Church, 241 Thomas, Clarence, 14, 928-930, 1121; and affirmative action, 22, 929; and Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, 339; and Hill, Anita, 1108

Personages Index Thomas, Franklin, 1004 Thomas, J. B., 608 Thompson, William C., 163 Thornton, Charles B. (Tex), 746 Thurmond, Strom, 445, 720, 888 Tilden, Samuel J., 248 Till, Emmett, 554, 931-932, 1122 Toomer, Jean, 541 Toure, Kwame (Stokely Carmichael), 1101 Touré, Sékou, 1101 Townsend, Robert, 355 Trotter, William Monroe, 501, 637, 919 Truman, Harry S., 281, 1122; and civil rights, 455, 556, 585, 719, 729-731, 812, 1024, 1122; desegregation of military, 579, 587, 590 Trumbull, Lyman, 106 Truth, Sojourner, 11, 44, 862-863, 1122; and Douglass, Frederick, 11 Tubman, Harriet, 11, 44, 538, 863, 924, 950, 1122 Turner, Henry McNeal, 1123 Turner, Nat, 1123 Tustennuggee Emartha (Jim Boy), 664 Underwood, Oscar, 303 Van Buren, Martin, 49 Vassa, Gustavas, 537 Venable, James, 527 Villa, Pancho, 148 Vinson, Fred M., 142, 918 Wade, Wyn, 1008 Waite, Morrison R., 759 Walcott, Derek, 1004 Walker, Alice, 543, 1123 Walker, Madame C. J., 779 Wallace, George, 172, 800-801, 945, 991 Wallace, Henry, 588 Walthall, Edward C., 295 Ward, Samuel Ringgold, 367 Warmoth, Henry Clay, 717

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1151

Warren, Earl, 137, 208, 772, 1123; Brown v. Board of Education, 142 Washington, Booker T., 108, 316, 538, 639, 681, 919, 970, 1124; accommodationist program, 501; Atlanta Compromise, 67-70; and Du Bois, W. E. B., 1124; and Fortune, T. Thomas, 1106; and Garvey, Marcus, 970; and National Negro Business League, 306 Washington, George, 277, 377, 777; and slavery, 383-384, 950 Waters, Muddy, 628 Weaver, John D., 146 Weaver, Robert, 94 Webster, Daniel, 389 Wells, Benjamin, 26 Wells, James Madison, 739 Wells-Barnett, Ida B., 1124 West, Cornel, 471 Whatcoat, Richard, 363 Wheatley, Phillis, 540 Whipper, William, 951 White, Byron R.; Washington v. Davis, 996 White, Walter, 341, 585, 639, 744, 1022, 1125 White, William, 364 Whitfield, James H., 538 Whittier, John Greenleaf, 42 Wilder, L. Douglas, 1010-1017, 1125 Wilkins, Roy, 500, 639, 912, 1125 Williams, Eric, 701 Wilson, Lionel, 1116 Winfrey, Oprah, 574 Winthrop, John, 866 Wise, Henry A., 439-440 Woods, Granville, 779 Woods, Tiger, 896 Woodson, Carter G., 32, 1125 Wright, Fielding, 720 Wright, Richard, 430, 542, 1125 York, 663 Young, Andrew, 1015, 1126 Young, Whitney M., Jr., 661, 1126

Subject Index Abbott, Benjamin, 363 Abbott, Robert S., 288, 309, 400, 401 Abdullah Al-Amin, Jamil (H. Rap Brown), 1100 Abel, I. W., 746 Abelman v. Booth, 854 Abernathy, Ralph, 616, 800, 881, 1096; and Poor People’s March on Washington, 726 Abolition, 1-4, 59, 832, 853, 923; American Anti-Slavery Society, 42-46; and Brown, John, 1100; and Emancipation Proclamation, 323326; and National Council of Colored People, 654-657; Newspapers, 2, 5, 10, 532-537, 689-693; and proslavery argument, 731735; and Underground Railroad, 947-952; and women, 5-13 Abrahams, Peter, 430 Abrams v. Johnson, 810 Accommodationism, 316, 501, 919; and Atlanta Compromise, 67-70 Adarand Constructors v. Peña, 13-14, 22 Affirmative action, 13, 15-24, 210, 334, 455; and National Urban League, 661; and quotas, 71-78, 211, 339, 961; and Thomas, Clarence, 929 Africa, John (Vincent Leapheart), 621 African American music, 901 African Communities League, 971 African Intelligencer, The, 64 African Liberation Day, 25 African Methodist Episcopal Church, 26-30, 98, 366; book publishing, 570; and Payne, Daniel Alexander, 1117; and Turner, Henry McNeal, 1123 African Methodist Episcopal Zion Churches, 30-31; book publishing, 570 “Afro-American,” 1106

Afrocentrism, 31-32, 131, 318 Agricultural Adjustment Act of 1933, 36 Agriculture, 32-39, 304, 306; and demographics, 289; research, 779; sharecropping, 308, 806-808 AIDS conspiracy theory, 940 Alabama; affirmative action, 21; Birmingham March, 91-94; bombings, 169-171, 174, 526; Children’s Crusade, 214; Clotilde capture, 234-239; demographics, 399; elections, 984; and Freedom Rides, 372; gerrymandering, 348, 395, 397-398; Jim Crow laws, 477; Lowndes County Freedom Organization, 124; Mobile riot, 741-745; Montgomery bus boycott, 209, 614-619; and National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, 650-651; poll taxes, 435, 724; Scottsboro cases, 687-688, 727728, 786-790; Selma-Montgomery march, 209, 797-804; Tuskegee experiment, 939-940; Tuskegee Institute, 67, 108 Alabama Dry Dock and Shipbuilding Company, 742 Albany, Georgia, 910 Albemarle Paper Company v. Moody, 39-40 Alexander v. Holmes County Board of Education, 40-42, 143 Ali, Muhammad, 895, 901, 1096; and military conscription, 982 All African People’s Revolutionary Party, 25 All-Negro Hour, The (radio program), 572 All-volunteer force, 580 Allen, Richard, 26-27, 44, 98, 363, 655, 1096

1154

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Subject Index

Allen v. Board of Elections, 987 American and Foreign Anti-Slavery Society, 535 American Anti-Slavery Society, 2, 42-46, 534, 922, 1105-1106 American Civil Liberties Union, 789 American Colonization Society, 1, 28, 43, 46, 64, 533 American Indian Movement, 665 American Indians, 197 American Moral Reform Society, 1106 American Negro Academy, 1103 Amistad, 47-51 Amos, James Ralston, 64 Amos and Andy (radio program), 571 Anderson, Jack, 254 Anderson, Joe, 777 Anderson, Marian, 51-58, 1096 Angelou, Maya, 595, 1097 Anthony, Susan B., 927 Anti-Defamation League, 595 Anti-Semitism, 525, 594 Antislavery laws of 1777 and 1807, 58-62 Antislavery societies, 7-8, 533, 667, 703, 832, 922 Aristide, Jean-Bertrand, 422 Arkansas; bombings, 169; elections, 718; Jim Crow laws, 477; poll taxes, 435 Armstrong, Louis, 429 Arson and black churches, 174 Asante, Molefi Kete, 31-32, 318, 1097 Ashe, Arthur, 895 Ashmun, Jehudi, 64 Ashmun Institute, 62-66 Association for the Protection of Colored Women, 659 Astronauts, 781 At-large elections, 987 Atchison, David R., 492 Atlanta Compromise, 67-70, 316, 1124 Atlanta University, 108, 570, 682, 919 Attucks, Crispus, 277, 663 Autobiographies, 538; Anderson, Marian, 57; Douglass, Frederick,

538, 689; Powell, Colin, 1005; Washington, Booker T., 538, 970 Autobiography of Malcolm X, The, 539 Aviators, 937-939 Back Panthers (military), 1022 Back-to-Africa movements, 28, 42, 64, 81, 380, 533, 701; American Colonization Society, 46 Bailey, F. Lee, 815 Baird, Absalom, 740 Baker, Ella Jo, 206, 411, 881, 908 Baker, Josephine, 1097 Baker v. Carr, 397 Bakke, Alan, 18, 71-78 Bakke case, 18, 71-78, 339, 962 Baldwin, James, 431, 542, 1098 Baliles, Gerald L., 1011 Banking practices, 197 Banneker, Benjamin, 44, 777 Baptist Church, 78-82, 98; and King, Martin Luther, Jr., 1112 Baraka, Amiri, 1098 Bargonetti, Jill, 781 Barnett, Ferdinand L., 1124 Barnett, Ross, 975, 978 Baseball, 889, 1119; integration of, 82-90 Basketball, 893 Bates, Daisy, 215 Batson v. Kentucky, 90-91, 314 Batt, John, 378 “Battle Hymn of the Republic, The” (Howe), 862 Beaumont, Texas, riots, 743 Beecher, Catharine, 864 Bell, Alexander Graham, 779 Beloved (Morrison), 543 Berea College v. Kentucky, 771 Berry, Mary Francis, 594 Bethel African Methodist Episcopal Church, 365 Bethune, Mary McLeod, 94, 658, 1098 Bethune-Cookman College, 1098 Beulah (radio program), 571 Biden, Joseph, 929 Bidwell, Barnabas, 61

Subject Index Bigotry, 788 Bill of Rights, U.S., 179 Birmingham, Alabama; church bombings, 171; demographics, 291 Birmingham March, 91-94 Birth of a Nation (film), 352-354, 525, 844, 900 “Black Belt,” 765 Black “brute” and “buck” stereotypes, 899 Black Cabinet, 94-95, 1120 Black Christian Nationalist Movement, 95-97 Black church, 97-103, 119; and Turner, Henry McNeal, 1123 Black codes, 103-107, 179, 200, 368, 715, 738, 790, 834; and Jim Crow laws, 476 Black colleges and universities, 132133, 369, 954; sports, 893 Black Enterprise, 571, 1005, 1107 Black flight, 112-114 Black History Month, 1125 Black Is Beautiful movement, 114115 Black Jews, 115-117 Black Journal (television), 574 “Black Manifesto,” 117-118 Black middle class/black underclass relations, 596 Black Monday, 1007 Black nationalism, 96, 101, 118-123, 129, 242, 631; and Black Panther Party, 123-129; and Garvey, Marcus, 1106; and Malcolm X, 1115; and Pan-Africanism, 702; and Universal Negro Improvement Association, 969974 Black Panther Party, 121, 123-129, 132, 424; and Carmichael, Stokely, 1101; and Cleaver, Eldridge, 1102; and Davis, Angela, 1103; and Newton, Huey P., 1116; and Seale, Bobby, 1121 Black Power movement, 97, 101, 114, 129-132, 210, 212, 473, 748, 909;

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1155

and Baraka, Amiri, 1098; and Carmichael, Stokely, 1101; and Cleaver, Eldridge, 1102; and National Urban League, 661 Black Star Line, 972 Black Stars, 571 Black studies, 133 Black United Students, 132-133 Black Woman’s Voice, 659 Black, Hugo L., 700, 921, 975; and Ku Klux Klan, 526 Blackwell, David, 780 Blair, Henry, 778 Blaxploitation films, 355 Bleeding Kansas, 134-137, 437 Blueford, Guion, 781 Blues, 431, 627 Body of Liberties, 866 Boll weevil, 35 Bolling v. Sharpe, 137-138 Bond, Julian, 1099; and King, Martin Luther, Jr., 1099 Book publishing, 570 Booth, John Wilkes, 1114 Booth, Sherman M., 854 Border Ruffians, 135, 436 Boston; Freemasons, 377-381; Liberator, The, 532-537 Boston massacre, 277 Bowlegs, Billy, 665 Bowlegs, Jim, 665 Boxill, Bernard R., 457, 459 Boynton v. Virginia, 253 Bradley, Ed, 574 Bradley, Joseph P., 203, 820 Bradley, Stephen R., 61 Bradley, Thomas, 517, 1099 Bradstreet, Simon, 868 Bradwell v. Illinois, 761 Brady, Tom, 1007 Braun, Carol Moseley, 1099 Brawley, Tawana, 1121 Breckenridge, Calvin, 414 Breedlove v. Suttles, 435, 987 Brennan, William J., 506 Brewer, David J.; Louisville, New Orleans, and Texas Railway Company v. Mississippi, 552

1156

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Subject Index

Breyer, Stephen G.; and affirmative action, 23 Brooke, Edward W., 343, 746, 1014, 1100 Brooklyn Dodgers, 82-90 Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, 138-140, 279, 309, 341, 450, 1118 Browder v. Gayle, 617 Brown, H. Rap, 909, 1100 Brown, Henry “Box,” 949 Brown, James, 1121 Brown, Jim, 901 Brown, John, 135, 436-441, 924, 1100; and Tubman, Harriet, 1122 Brown, Oliver, 215 Brown, Ron, 754 Brown, Tony, 574 Brown, William Wells, 951 Brown II, 142, 955 Brown v. Board of Education (1954), 140-144, 180, 192, 208, 258, 318, 404, 456, 506, 544, 566, 614, 641, 645-646, 712, 792, 914, 955, 975; and Marshall, Thurgood, 1115; and Southern Manifesto, 773, 887889; and Warren, Earl, 1124; and White Citizens’ Councils, 1007 Brown v. Mississippi, 144-145 Brownsville incident, 145-146 Bruce, Blanche K., 241, 717, 1100 Bruce, Josephine B., 241 Bryan, Andrew, 79 Buchanan, Bessie, 162 Buchanan, James, 134, 136 Buchanan v. Warley, 137, 147, 640, 812 Buffalo soldiers, 147-150 Bull, William, 904 Bunche, Ralph, 1100 Burger, Warren, 414, 416, 915 Burr, Aaron, 60 Burton, LeVar, 768 Burton v. Wilmington Parking Authority, 150-151, 620 Bush, George, 1119; and affirmative action, 22; and civil rights, 199; and Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, 339; and Haitians, 423; and Supreme

Court, 928; and Thomas, Clarence, 1121 Bush, George W., 722, 1119 Bush v. Vera, 810 Busing. See School busing Busing and integration, 456 Butler, Pierce, 728 Byrd, Harry, 773 Calhoun, John C., 246 Callahan, William W., 788 Capital punishment, 557-558 Capitalism, 226 Caplan, Lincoln, 22 Cardozo, Benjamin N.; Nixon v. Condon, 685 Carmichael, Stokely, 124, 127, 129130, 212, 375, 473, 501, 909, 1004, 1101; and Vietnam War, 981 Carter, Jimmy, 257, 965, 1109, 1126 Carter, John Pym, 64 Carver, George Washington, 779 Cary, Mary Ann Shadd, 10 Catholic Conference of Bishops, 218 Cato, Gavin, 269 Cavanagh, Jerome, 746 Censuses, 285, 287, 305 Champion, James, 26 Chaney, James Earl, 219-225, 254, 263, 375, 472, 908 Charleston, Oscar, 891 Charleston race riots, 151-152 Chase, Salmon, 494 Chavis, Benjamin, 593-597, 639, 1101 Chesnut, Mary Boykin, 861 Chicago; demographics, 399; elected officials, 718; and Great Migration, 288, 309; Ku Klux Klan, 526; radio programs, 572; riots, 152-154; sit-ins, 154-160, 406-413, 818-819; television stations, 574 Chicago Committee of Racial Equality, 1120 Chicago Defender, 288, 309, 401 Children in the Civil Rights movement, 214-215 Children’s Crusade, 214

Subject Index Chionesu, Philé, 597-600 Chisholm, Shirley, 161-168, 465, 721, 1004, 1101 Christianity, 78, 97, 363, 533, 821 Christopher Commission, 517 Church bombings, 169-174 Church burnings, 174-177 Citizens’ Councils of America, 1008 Citizenship, 347, 357; and slavery, 783-786, 1120 Civil liberties, 228 Civil Rights Act of 1866, 177-182, 332, 703, 756, 925 Civil Rights Act of 1871, 180 Civil Rights Act of 1875, 332, 759 Civil Rights Act of 1957, 182-183, 185, 720, 954-958 Civil Rights Act of 1960, 183-188, 955 Civil Rights Act of 1964, 93, 188-195, 210, 332, 343, 375, 451, 455, 496, 720, 775, 798, 956; and Johnson, Lyndon B., 1111 Civil Rights Act of 1968, 195-198; and restrictive covenants, 767 Civil Rights Act of 1991, 198-199, 416; and employment discrimination, 568 Civil Rights Acts of 1866-1875, 199202, 343, 370, 834 Civil rights and liberties, 347 Civil Rights cases, 201, 202-204, 478479, 710, 759 Civil Rights Commission, 183 Civil Rights movement, 100, 131, 182, 204-214, 318, 472, 559, 614, 642, 674, 985, 997, 1001; Birmingham March, 91-94; and Congress of Racial Equality, 253; Freedom Rides, 372-374; Freedom Summer, 374-377; and King, Martin Luther, Jr., 1112; and Little Rock school desegregation crisis, 544-548, 774; and the media, 374, 488, 573, 727, 799, 910; and National Urban League, 661; and politics, 721; and Poor People’s March on Washington, 725-727; and school desegregation, 770-

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1157

776; Selma-Montgomery march, 797-804; sit-ins, 406-413, 818-819; Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, 908-912; and television, 573; and Vietnam War, 981-982; and voting rights, 720; and World War II, 584 Civil Rights Restoration Act of 1988, 215-219 Civil rights worker murders, 219225, 254, 263, 375, 472, 908 Civil Service Commission, 334 Civil War, 226-233, 924; draft riots, 298-302; and Emancipation Proclamation, 323-326; Fiftyfourth Massachusetts Colored Regiment, 230; and Harpers Ferry raid, 436-441; and Native Americans, 665; sectional issues, 851; and slavery, 323-326, 851 Civil War Amendments, 202, 819820, 925 Clark, Marcia, 814 Clark, Mark, 424-426 Classic, United States v. See United States v. Classic Clay, Henry, 46, 244, 246 Cleage, Albert, 96 Cleaver, Eldridge, 127-128, 1102; and Vietnam War, 981 Cleveland, Grover, 69 Clinton, Bill, 23, 1097; and church burnings, 176; and Haitians, 423; and Jackson, Jesse, 754; and Jordan, Vernon, 1111 Clinton massacre, 233-234 Clotilde (ship), 234-239 Cochran, Johnnie, 815 Coffin, Levi, 950 COFO. See Council of Federated Organizations Colegrove v. Green, 397 Coleman, Marshall, 1014 Colfax massacre, 239-240 College entrance examinations, 319 Colleges and universities, 107-112; book publishing, 570; United Negro College Fund, 953-954

1158

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Subject Index

Collins v. Hardyman, 414 Colmer, William, 186 Color Purple, The (Walker), 543, 1123 Colored Farmers’ Alliance, 33 Colored Women’s League, 240-241 Combahee River Collective, 241-243 Combahee River Collective Statement, 242 Commandment Keepers Ethiopian Hebrew Congregation, 115 Commission for Racial Justice, 1101 Commission on Civil Rights, 185. See United States Commission on Civil Rights Committee Against Jim Crow in Military Service, 587 Committee for Improving the Industrial Conditions of Negroes in New York, 659 Commonwealth, 862 Communist Party, 786; and Davis, Angela, 1103; and Du Bois, W. E. B., 1104; and farmworkers, 35; and Rustin, Bayard, 1120; and Wright, Richard, 1126 Compromise of 1850, 243-247, 385, 387, 490, 851, 923, 1106 Compromise of 1877, 248-249 Condon, James, 876 Cone, James, 1102 Coney, Asia, 597-600 Confiscation Acts of 1861 and 1862, 249-250 Congress, U.S.; antilynching bill, 556; Black Caucus, 256-258; Black representatives, 161-168, 718; and Chisholm, Shirley, 161-168; and gerrymandering, 393-398, 808-811; Missouri Compromise, 606-611; and Reconstruction, 716; and redistricting, 393-397, 808-811; Southern Manifesto, 887-889. See also individual laws Congress of Racial Equality, 210, 250-255, 375, 675, 910; and Council of Federated Organizations, 260; and Farmer, James, 1105; and Freedom Rides,

372-374; and Greensboro sit-ins, 408; and Innis, Roy, 1109; and Journey of Reconciliation, 481-490; and McKissick, Floyd, 1115; and Rustin, Bayard, 1120 Congressional Black Caucus, 256-258, 422, 721; and Nixon, Richard M., 721 Connecticut; and fugitive slave laws, 385 Connell, Pat, 574 Conner, Eugene “Bull,” 92 Conscientious objectors, 251 Conscription. See Military conscription Conscription Act of 1863, 298-302 Conspiracy Act of 1708 (New York), 671 Constitution, U.S.; color-blindness of, 791; enumeration clause, 607, 697, 714, 930-931; and fugitive slaves, 387; and gerrymandering, 394; King, Martin Luther, Jr., on, 453; and slavery, 382, 608, 852; and understanding tests, 952-953. See also individual amendments Constitutional Convention, 606, 697; and slavery, 713-714, 852, 930-931 Conyers, John, 1117 Cook, Coralie Franklin, 241 Cook, Helen A., 240 Cook, John T., 240 Coolidge, Calvin, 1106 Cooper, Anna J., 241 Cooper, Jack, 572 Cooper v. Aaron, 258-259 CORE. See Congress of Racial Equality Corman, James C., 746 Cornish, Samuel, 571 Coronado, Francisco Vásquez de, 662 Corrigan v. Buckley, 641, 812 Cosby, Bill, 1102 Cotton farming, 32-34, 286, 304 Council of Federated Organizations, 214, 220, 260-267, 374-377, 604 Court, Gus, 261

Subject Index Cowboys, 267-268 Craft, William and Ellen, 949 Crandall, Prudence, 5 Cresson, Sarah Emlen, 63 Crime and race/ethnicity, 786 Crime Control Act of 1934, 526 Crisis, The, 501, 571, 637, 660, 1125 Crop-lien farming, 33 Crown Heights conflicts, 268-270, 474 Cruikshank, United States v. See United States v. Cruikshank Cruikshank, William, 959-960 Crummell, Alexander, 1102 Crusade for Citizenship, 883 Cuba, 490; and slave trade, 50; slavery in, 47 Cuban Americans, 273, 577 Cubans, 270-276 Cuffe, Paul, 118, 663 Cuffee, 671 Cullen, Countée, 427, 432 Culture of poverty, 624 Cumming v. Richmond County Board of Education, 140, 276-277 Curry, John Stuart, 438 Danforth, John C., 218 Darden, Christopher, 814 Davis, Angela, 1103 Davis, Benjamin O., Jr., 938, 1022, 1103 Davis, Benjamin O., Sr., 581, 1020, 1103 Davis, Billy, 1107 Davis, Jefferson, 228, 246, 301 Davis, Ossie, 573 Davis v. Bandemer, 395 Dawson, William L., 718 Day, William R.; Buchanan v. Warley, 147 Daytona Educational and Industrial School for Negro Girls, 1098 Declaration of Independence; and Million Woman March, 598 Declaration of Sentiments, 42, 535 Dees, Morris, 528 Defense industry desegregation, 277-283

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1159

DeFunis v. Odegaard, 17 Delany, Martin Robison, 1103 Dellums, Ronald, 167 Democratic Party, 281, 490, 604, 718, 722; and Jackson, Jesse, 461-466, 754; and Reconstruction, 717 Demographics, 283-294; Black flight, 112-114; and economic trends, 304-314; farmworkers, 37 Dennis, David, 261 Denny, Reginald, 550 DePriest, Oscar, 718 Desegregation; defense industries, 277-283; public schools, 40, 137, 192, 207, 215, 258, 456, 506, 614, 912-913 Detroit riots, 743, 745-746, 751, 1001, 1021 Dew, Thomas R., 732 Dickey, John Miller, 63 Dickinson, Jonathan, 706 Diop, Cheikh Anta, 32 Dirksen, Everett M., 186, 190, 196, 344 Discrimination, 674; employment, 327; housing, 458; by private parties, 203; racial and ethnic, 600 Disfranchisement laws, 184; in Mississippi, 294-298 “Dixiecrats,” 282, 719-720 Dixon, Thomas, 900 Do the Right Thing, 356 Dodge Revolutionary Union Movement, 530-532 Douglas, Stephen A., 134, 247, 491, 1113 Douglas, William O.; Lassiter v. Northampton County Board of Elections, 530 Douglass, Frederick, 3, 44, 367, 538, 656, 663, 689, 832, 924, 951, 1103, 1124; and Garrison, William Lloyd, 690; and North Star, The, 689-693; and Thirteenth Amendment, 925; and Truth, Sojourner, 11 Draft, military. See Military conscription Draft riots, 298-302, 460

1160

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Subject Index

Dred Scott case. See Scott v. Sandford D’Souza, Dinesh, 1002 Dual federalism, 758 Du Bois, W. E. B., 70, 108, 119, 317, 400, 570, 637, 1104; and Niagara Movement, 501, 682; and PanAfricanism, 701-702; and “Talented Tenth,” 919-921; and United Nations, 587; and Washington, Booker T., 1124; writings of, 539 Dukakis, Michael, 1110 Duke, David, 527 Dunbar, Paul Laurence, 540 Dyer, L. C., 303 Dyer antilynching bill, 302-304 East St. Louis riot of 1917, 751 Eastern European Jews, 470 Eastland, James O., 186, 942, 993 Ebony, 571, 1111 Eclipse, 237 Economic trends, 304-314 Edmonson v. Leesville Concrete Company, 314-315 Edmundson, William, 705 Education, 68, 292, 315-321, 328, 369, 457, 655; colleges and universities, 107-112, 132-133, 369, 893; integration of University of Mississippi, 974-979; and school desegregation, 770-776; and separate but equal doctrine, 917-918; United Negro College Fund, 953-954; and Washington, Booker T., 1124 Edwards v. South Carolina, 322 Eisenhower, Dwight D., 588, 912, 1104; and Anderson, Marian, 55, 57; and civil rights, 185, 187, 882; and Civil Rights Act of 1960, 184; and Little Rock school desegregation crisis, 259, 544-548, 774; and military segregation, 589; and Summit Meeting of National Negro Leaders, 912-913; and Warren, Earl, 1123; and World War II, 1023

Eisenstein, Zillah, 242 Elder, Lee, 896 Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965, 775 Ellington, Duke, 428, 572 Ellison, Ralph, 431, 542 Emancipation, compensated, 42, 361 Emancipation Day, 926 Emancipation Proclamation, 2, 228, 250, 323-326, 452, 692, 738, 1114 Emperor Jones, The (O’Neill), 139, 1119 Employment, 327-331, 368, 401; broadcasting, 574. See also Labor Employment Act of 1946, 333 Employment discrimination, 192, 198-199, 415-417, 568, 702-703, 962-968, 996-997; and National Urban League, 661 Encyclopedia Africana, 1104 Enforcement Act of 1870, 347, 716, 961 English Bill, 136 Equal Employment Opportunity Act of 1972, 331-338, 962 Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, 193, 210, 332, 338339, 416, 956; and Thomas, Clarence, 929 Equal Pay Act of 1963, 332 Equal Rights Party, 692 Ervin, Sam, 197, 962 Estevanico Dorantes, 662 Ethnic identity, 118 Ethnocentrism, 844 Evangelicalism, 43 Evans v. Abney, 340 Evers, Medgar, 170, 450, 1105 Executive Order 8802, 277-283, 341, 585, 719, 1020, 1120; and Randolph, A. Philip, 1118 Executive Order 9008, 729-731 Executive Order 9980, 730 Executive Order 9981, 282, 583-591, 719, 730, 1122; and Randolph, A. Philip, 1118 Executive Order 10925, 332 Executive Order 11063, 343 Executive Order 11246, 962

Subject Index Fair Employment Practices Committee, 280, 340-342, 1020 Fair Housing Act of 1968, 342-346, 480 Fair Housing Amendments Act of 1988, 345 Family and socialization, 320, 623 Family demographics, 291-293 Fard, W. D., 631-632, 1116 Farmer, James, 163, 372, 481, 1105, 1120 Farrakhan, Louis, 121, 257, 634, 1105; and Jackson, Jesse, 464, 1105; and Jews, 474; and Malcolm X, 1105; and the media, 594; and Million Man March, 593-597 Faubus, Orval, 258-259, 544-548, 774 FBI. See Federal Bureau of Investigation Federal Bureau of Investigation, 127, 131; and church burnings, 175; and Civil Rights movement, 452; and civil rights murders, 222; and Clark-Hampton deaths, 424; and Freedom Summer, 376; and King, Martin Luther, Jr., assassination, 512; and Ku Klux Klan, 526 Federal Communications Commission, 22, 574 Federal Corrupt Practices Act of 1910, 680 Federal Council on Negro Affairs, 94-95 Fellowship of Reconciliation, 481490 Fernando, 870 Ferraro, Geraldine, 465 Field, Stephen J., 820 Fifteenth Amendment, 184, 201, 205, 294, 332, 347-352, 398, 419, 756, 875, 988; and voting rights, 961 Fifth Amendment, 137-138, 180, 784 Fifty-fourth Massachusetts Colored Regiment, 230 Fillmore, Millard, 246 Films, 352-357, 376, 844; and stereotypes, 901 First Amendment, 180, 1019

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1161

Fisk Jubilee Chorus, 626 Fisk University, 539, 570, 1021 Fitzgerald, Ella, 428 Fitzhugh, George, 734, 830 Florida; bombings, 169; Cuban community, 270-276, 422; Haitian community, 422; Hispanic communities, 110; Jamaican community, 467; Jim Crow laws, 477; poll taxes, 724; presidential election of 2000, 722; riots, 576578; Seminole Wars, 662; slave trade, 235; slavery, 285 Football, 462, 814, 892, 901, 997 Foraker, Joseph B., 146 Forman, James, 911 Forten, James, 26, 534, 1105 Forten, James, Jr., 778 Fortune, T. Thomas, 306, 1106; and Washington, Booker T., 1106 Foster, Bill, 236 Foster, Stephen, 626 Fourteenth Amendment, 137-138, 142, 179, 201, 332, 343, 357-362, 710, 756, 764, 834, 875, 925, 960; and Civil Rights cases, 202-204; and gerrymandering, 395; and Stevens, Thaddeus, 1121; and White primaries, 1009-1010 Fourth Amendment, 180 Fox, George, 704 Frank v. Mangum, 619 Frankfurter, Felix, 397, 921 Franklin, Benjamin, 378, 704, 922 Franklin, Raymond S., 845 Frazier, Demita, 242 Frederickson, George, 844 Free African Society, 27, 44, 98, 362366 Free blacks, 1, 366-367; demographics of, 286-287 Free Produce Society, 29, 365 Free-soil movement, 45, 134, 245 Free-Soil Party, 135, 437, 491 Free State Party, 134, 436 Freedmen’s Bureau, 178, 201, 306, 316, 367-371, 716, 738 Freedom Farms Corporation, 1108

1162

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Subject Index

Freedom Rides, 210, 252-253, 372374, 910; and Farmer, James, 1105 Freedom Summer, 220, 262, 264, 374377, 910 Freedom's Journal, 571 Freemasons, 377-381 Frémont, John C., 247 Fugitive Slave Law of 1793, 382-386 Fugitive Slave Law of 1850, 387-391, 490, 923 Fugitive slave laws, 853, 948 Fugitive slaves; and Underground Railroad, 947-952 Fullilove v. Klutznick, 20, 391-393 Gallup polls, 772 Gandhi, Mohandas K., 154, 251, 407, 481, 508, 1106; and King, Martin Luther, Jr., 1106 Garnet, Henry Highland, 951 Garrettson, Freeborn, 363 Garrison, William Lloyd, 2, 5, 9, 42, 832, 853, 863, 935, 1106; and Douglass, Frederick, 690; and Liberator, The, 532-537; opponents of, 732; and Thirteenth Amendment, 925 Garvey, Marcus, 115, 120, 403, 467, 632, 640, 969-974, 1004, 1106; and Malcolm X, 1115; and PanAfricanism, 701; and Washington, Booker T., 970 Garvey’s Watchman, 970 Gates, Daryl, 517, 548 Geary, John W., 135 George, David, 79 George, Walter, 888 Georgia; Atlanta Compromise, 67-70; Baptist Church, 79; bombings, 169; capital punishment, 557; demographics, 291, 399; elections, 613, 718, 984; and Freedom Rides, 372; gerrymandering, 396; Jim Crow laws, 477; Ku Klux Klan, 353, 525; lynching, 554; schools, 271, 770; slave trade, 61, 285 Georgia v. McCollum, 91 Geronimo, 148

Gerry, Elbridge, 394 Gerrymandering, 348, 393-398, 944, 956; and schools, 506; Shaw v. Hunt, 808-811 Gibson, Josh, 891 Giddings, Doras, 364 Gillem Board, 586 Ginsburg, Ruth Bader; and affirmative action, 23 Glazer, Nathan, 455, 458 Go Tell It on the Mountain (Baldwin), 543 Goetz, Bernhard, 1121 Gold rush; California, 245 Goldman, Ronald, 814 Goldwater, Barry, 223 Golf, 895 Gomillion v. Lightfoot, 348, 395, 397-398 Gone with the Wind (film), 844, 899 Gong Lum v. Rice, 140 Gonzales, Pancho, 895 Goode, Mal, 574 Goode, Wilson, 622 Goodell, William, 853 Goodman, Andrew, 219-225, 263, 375, 472, 908 Gorbachev, Mikhail, 1119 Gordy, Berry, Jr., 1107 Gordy, Gwen, 1107 Gore, Al, 722 Gourdine, Meredith, 781 Grace, Charles Emmanuel “Sweet Daddy,” 1107 Grandfather clauses, 205, 348, 398399, 419-420, 640 Granger, Lester B., 660, 912 Grant, Ulysses S., 240, 529, 759; and civil rights, 201 Graves, Earl, 1005, 1107 Gray v. Sanders, 162 Great Depression, 278, 399, 632, 640, 789 Great Migration, 288, 308, 310, 399404; and sharecropping, 808 Green, Charles, 240 Green v. County School Board of New Kent County, 41, 143, 404-405, 914 Greenberg, Jack, 645, 648

Subject Index Greensboro, North Carolina, 818 Greensboro sit-ins, 209 Gregg v. Georgia, 557 Griffin v. Breckenridge, 413-415, 480 Griffith, D. W., 900 Griggs v. Duke Power Company, 15, 334, 415-417, 996 Grimké, Angelina, 8, 861 Grimké, Charlotte Forten, 240 Grimké, Sarah, 8, 861 Grove City College v. Bell, 217 Groves v. Slaughter, 417 Grovey, Richard Randolph, 876 Grovey v. Townsend, 206, 418-419, 687, 876, 958, 1010 Guest, United States v. See United States v. Guest Guinn v. United States, 205, 348, 398, 419-420, 640 Gulf War, 1118 Gumbel, Bryant, 574 Haiti, 379 Haitians, 421-423; refugees, 273 Hale, John P., 491 Haley, Alex, 539, 767-768, 1107 Hall, Prince, 377-381 Hamer, Fannie Lou, 101, 1108 Hamilton, Alexander, 60, 707 Hammond, James Henry, 733 Hampton, Fred, 424-426 Hampton, Wade, 151, 717 Hampton Institute, 67, 570, 1124 Hannah, Marc, 780 Harding, Warren, 302 Harlan, John M., 271, 480, 764, 791 Harlem, New York, 972; riots, 744, 750 Harlem Commonwealth Council, 1109 Harlem Renaissance, 403, 426-433, 540, 628, 1114; and Hughes, Langston, 1109; and Locke, Alain, 1114 Harlins, Latasha, 434, 522 Harper, Frances Ellen Watkins, 10 Harper v. Virginia Board of Elections, 207, 435-436, 725, 945, 987 Harpers Ferry raid, 436-441, 1122

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1163

Harris, Bernard, 781 Harris, Fred R., 500, 746 Harris, United States v. See United States v. Harris Harrison, Pat, 303 Harrison, Thomas, 704 Hart, Gary, 462 Hastie, William, 94, 1020 Hate crimes, 441, 735-736, 1018; church bombings, 169-174; Clinton massacre, 233-234 Havens v. Coleman, 345 Hawkins, Yusuf, 441-442 Hayden, Lewis, 951 Hayes, George E. C., 645 Hayes, Rutherford B., 248-249, 717, 755, 1108 Head Start, 165 Heart of Atlanta Motel v. United States, 442-449, 497 Henderson, Fletcher, 428 Henderson v. United States, 712 Henry, Aaron, 260 Higginson, Thomas Wentworth, 437 Hill, Anita, 928-930, 1108, 1121 Hill, Larry, 176 Hilliard, Asa, 32 Hip-hop, 630 Hitler, Adolf, 1116 Hodges v. United States, 480 Holder, Eric, 1004 Holland, Spessard L., 942-943 Hollywood Shuffle, 355 Holmes, Oliver Wendell; Moore v. Dempsey, 619 Holmes, Oliver Wendell, Jr., 875 Homestead Act of 1862, 794 Hooker, John Lee, 628 Hooks, Benjamin, 574, 639, 1108 Hoover, Herbert, 1098 Hoover, J. Edgar, 127; and civil rights worker murders, 222; and urban rioting, 998 Hopkins, Pauline E., 541 Hopwood v. Texas, 1094 Houser, George M., 481 Housing; restrictive covenants, 766767

1164

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Subject Index

Housing and Community Development Act of 1974, 346 Housing and Urban Development Act of 1968, 346 Housing and Urban Development, U.S. Department of, 196 Housing discrimination, 195-198, 342-346, 479-480, 763-767; Buchanan v. Warley, 147 Houston, Charles, 812 Howard, Oliver Otis, 1109 Howard Beach, 1121 Howard University, 54, 252, 565, 570, 780, 1013, 1109; and Locke, Alain, 1114 Howe, Julia Ward, 862, 927 Howe, Samuel Gridley, 437 Hughes, Charles Evans; Brown v. Mississippi, 144; Missouri ex rel. Gaines v. Canada, 612; Norris v. Alabama, 688 Hughes, Henry, 734, 844 Hughes, Langston, 65, 403, 427, 431, 541, 1109 Hughes, Richard J., 678 Humphrey, Hubert H., 189, 965 Hunter, Robert, 671-672 Hurston, Zora Neale, 430, 543, 1114, 1123 “I Have a Dream” speech, 449-454, 509, 1113 Illinois, 696 Illiteracy; and slavery, 569, 855 Imes, Elmer Samuel, 780 Immigration Act of 1921, 525 Immigration and Nationality Act of 1952, 467 Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965, 467 Income levels, 292 Indentured servants, 327, 382, 384, 854, 858, 865, 873 Indiana; and fugitive slave laws, 385 Indiana Territory, 696 Innis, Roy, 251, 1109 Integration, 454-459 Intelligence testing, 319

International Labor Defense, 786 Interracial and interethnic marriage, 600 Interstate Commerce Commission, 254 Invisible Man (Ellison), 542 Irish Americans, 300, 460-461, 739 Italian Americans, 441 Ito, Judge Lance, 814 J. E. B. v. Alabama, 91 Jackson, Andrew; and Seminole Wars, 665 Jackson, Jesse, 474, 1109; and Chicago riots, 153; and Clinton, Bill, 754; and Democratic Party, 754; and Farrakhan, Louis, 464, 1105; and Korean Americans, 521; presidential candidacy, 461-466; and Rainbow Coalition, 753-754; and Reagan, Ronald, 462-463 Jackson, Jimmie Lee, 799 Jackson, Mahalia, 628 Jacob, John, 661 Jamaican Americans, 466-469 Jamaicans; Universal Negro Improvement Association, 969974 James v. Bowman, 1026 Jay, John, 60, 707 Jazz, 428, 627 Jefferson, Thomas; and Northwest Ordinance, 694; and slavery, 61 Jeffries, Edward J., 744 Jemison, T. J., 881 Jenkins, Herbert, 746 Jenkins, Howard, 645 Jennings, Thomas L., 778 Jet, 571, 932 Jews, 17, 115-117, 470-475, 766; and Civil Rights movement, 883; Crown Heights conflicts, 268-270; and Farrakhan, Louis, 594; and Jackson, Jesse, 464, 474; and quotas, 966; and reparations, 117 Jim Crow laws, 190, 195, 207, 279, 401, 476-479; education, 141; and military, 587, 1024; and Plessy v. Ferguson, 711

Subject Index Johnson, Andrew, 103, 178, 218, 361, 1110; and civil rights, 200-201, 756; impeachment of, 180, 926; and Reconstruction, 103, 106, 179180, 357, 371, 714, 738, 755, 926; and Stevens, Thaddeus, 1121 Johnson, Andrew (student), 484 Johnson, Frank M., 801 Johnson, Jack, 894, 1110 Johnson, James Weldon, 1110 Johnson, John H., 571, 1111 Johnson, Lyndon B., 182, 1111; and affirmative action, 15, 71, 962; and civil rights, 189, 195, 343, 888; and Civil Rights Act of 1964, 191; and civil rights worker murders, 222; and Kerner Commission, 499-506; and King, Martin Luther, Jr., 189; and Ku Klux Klan, 527; and Marshall, Thurgood, 567; and riots, 211, 676, 678, 751; and Selma-Montgomery march, 800802; and Vietnam War, 981; and voting rights, 799, 985, 990 Johnston, Samuel, 383 Jones, Absalom, 26, 98, 363, 366, 1111 Jones, Elaine, 648 Jones, Jane Elizabeth, 10 Jones, LeRoi (Amiri Baraka), 1098 Jones, Quincy, 629 Jones v. Alfred H. Mayer Company, 196, 479-480, 703, 766, 769 Joplin, Scott, 627 Jordan, Vernon E., Jr., 661, 1111 Joseph, Chief, 1109 Journey of Reconciliation, 252, 481490 Julian, Percy, 780 Juries, 90-91, 314-315, 619-620, 687688, 728-729, 760, 907, 1017-1018; and fugitive slaves, 382, 388-390; and slaves, 872 Just, Ernest, 780 Just So Publishers, 570 Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854, 134, 490-496, 851 Karenga, Ron, 114

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1165

Katzenbach, Nicholas, 985 Katzenbach v. McClung, 496-498 Keith, George, 705 Kelly, Harry F., 744 Kennedy, Anthony M., 315, 728 Kennedy, John F., 1111; assassination of, 189, 562; and Birmingham March, 92-93; and civil rights, 183, 189, 332, 343, 444, 451, 499, 720, 910; and Malcolm X, 634; and Marshall, Thurgood, 648; and Meredith, James, 976 Kennedy, Robert F., 222, 1107, 1112; and civil rights, 499; and Meredith, James, 975 Kennedy, Ted, 217 Kent State University, 133; shooting, 700 Kentucky; Jim Crow laws, 477 Kenyatta, Jomo, 701 Kerner, Otto, 153, 500, 635, 746, 998 Kerner Commission, 153, 499-506, 635, 679, 746-747, 749, 751, 998 Key, Elizabeth, 870 Keyes v. Denver School District No. 1, 506-507 King, Don, 1121 King, Martin Luther, Jr., 101, 209, 473, 616, 908, 912, 1112; assassination of, 196, 507-515; and Birmingham March, 91-94; and Bond, Julian, 1099; and Gandhi, Mohandas K., 1106; “I Have a Dream” speech, 449-454, 509; and Johnson, Lyndon B., 189; “Letter from Birmingham Jail,” 92, 209, 450, 978; and Malcolm X, 799; and the media, 251; and Poor People’s March on Washington, 726; and Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, 411; and Vietnam War, 212, 981; and Watts riot, 1001; and Young, Andrew, 1126 King, Rodney, 515-519, 522, 548, 752, 816, 1113 King, Rufus, 608 Klanwatch Project, 527 Knights of the White Camelia, 524

1166

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Subject Index

Koon, Stacey, 516, 549 Korean Americans, 434, 518, 520-523 Korean War, 579, 589, 1013 Kozol, Jonathan, 457 Ku Klux Klan, 178, 201, 375, 478, 523-529, 1025-1026; and Reconstruction, 717; and Snapple, 940; and White Citizens’ Councils, 1007 Ku Klux Klan Acts, 524, 529 Kunta Kinte, 767-768, 1107 Labor, 327-331; and affirmative action, 15-24; agriculture, 32-39, 806-808; and Civil War, 226; competition with Irish Americans, 460; defense industries, 277-283; and Equal Employment Opportunity Act, 331-338; and Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, 338339; and Fair Employment Practices Committee, 340-342; and Freedmen’s Bureau, 368; and Great Migration, 400; and Jim Crow laws, 476; League of Revolutionary Black Workers, 530-532; and National Urban League, 659-661; and Native Americans, 662; occupations, 108, 305, 309; railroads, 138-140; and Randolph, A. Philip, 1118; sharecropping, 806-808; and urbanization, 311; and Washington, Booker T., 317; and World War II, 467, 1021. See also Slavery Labor movement, 131, 139, 279, 530532 Lance v. Wilson, 398 Lassiter v. Northampton County Board of Elections, 530, 953 Latimer, Lewis Henry, 779 Lawrence, Robert, 781 LDF. See National Association for the Advancement of Colored People Legal Defense and Educational Fund

League of Revolutionary Black Workers, 131, 530-532 Leaphart, Vincent, 621 Lecompton Constitution, 135 Lee, George, 261 Lee, Robert E., 301 Lee, Spike, 355, 1113 LeFlore, John, 742 Legal Defense Fund. See National Association for the Advancement of Colored People Legal Defense and Educational Fund Leibowitz, Samuel, 789 L’Enfant, Pierre, 777 “Letter from Birmingham Jail” (King), 92, 209, 450, 978, 1113 Levison, Stanley, 881, 883 Lewis, John, 253 Lewis, Monroe, 240 Lewis and Clark expedition, 663 Liberator, The, 2, 5, 44, 532-537, 690, 732, 1106 Liberty Party, 45, 535, 692 Liele, George, 79 Lincoln, Abraham, 247, 862, 1113; assassination of, 926; and Civil War, 227, 298-302; Emancipation Proclamation, 323-326; and Reconstruction, 177; and slavery, 250, 323-326 Lincoln, C. Eric, 98 Lincoln-Douglas debates, 134, 924 Lincoln University, 62-66 Lindbergh law, 526 Lindsay, John V., 500 Listen Chicago (radio program), 572 Literacy tests, 190, 205, 207, 296, 348, 419, 530, 718, 961; and grandfather clauses, 398-399; Mississippi, 294298; outlawing of, 530, 990-996; and understanding tests, 952-953; and Voting Rights Act of 1965, 985 Literature, 537-544; and Harlem Renaissance, 426-433; Roots, 767768 Little Rock school desegregation crisis, 208, 215, 258, 544-548, 646, 774; and the media, 572

Subject Index Liuzzo, Viola Lee, 527 Local Public Works Capital Development and Investment Act of 1976, 391 Locke, Alain, 1114 Logan, James, 706 Lopez, Narcisco, 490 Los Angeles; Harlins murder, 434; King beating case, 515-519, 1113; police, 515-519, 548, 814-816, 1000; Simpson murder trial, 813-818; Watts riot, 999-1002 Los Angeles riots of 1992, 518, 522, 548-552, 752 Lost-Found Nation of Islam, 1116 Louis, Joe, 894-895, 901 Louisiana; bombings, 169; demographics, 291; elections, 718, 984; Jim Crow laws, 477; New Orleans riot, 737-741; Plessy v. Ferguson, 708-713; slavery, 285 Louisiana Purchase, 244, 606, 851 Louisiana v. United States, 953 Louisville, New Orleans, and Texas Railway Company v. Mississippi, 552 Loving v. Virginia, 601, 712 Lowery, Joseph E., 881, 1114 Lowndes County Freedom Organization, 124 Lowry, Robert, 295 Lynching, 302, 524, 553-557, 960, 1021; Dyer antilynching bill, 302304; and rape, 900; Till, Emmett, 931-932, 1122 McCarthyism, 253 McCleskey v. Kemp, 557-558, 997 McCormick, Cyrus, 777 McCoy, Elijah, 778 McCullough, William M., 746 McDonald v. Santa Fe Transportation Company, 962 McDuffie, Arthur, 752 McKay, Claude, 427, 432, 467, 1004, 1114 McKissick, Floyd, 1115 McLaurin v. Oklahoma State Regents

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1167

for Higher Education, 141, 558-559, 772 McNair, Ronald, 781 McReynolds, James C., 728 Maddox, Alton, 270 Madikizela-Mandela, Winnie, 1094 Magazines, 571; African Intelligencer, The, 64; Black Enterprise, 571, 1005, 1107; Black Woman’s Voice, 659; Crisis, The, 501, 571, 637, 660, 1125; Ebony, 571, 1111; Jet, 571, 932; and Johnson, John H., 1111; Negro Digest, The, 571, 1111; Opportunity, 660; Sister’s Magazine, 659; Southern Workman, The, 570 Magnet schools, 458 Maine; abolitionism, 10; and Missouri Compromise, 244, 606611; slavery, 607 “Majority-minority” districts, 808811 Malcolm X, 121, 124, 129, 539, 559, 633, 1115; assassination of, 559564, 1116; and civil rights, 190; and Farrakhan, Louis, 1105; and Haley, Alex, 1107; and Kennedy, John F., 634; and King, Martin Luther, Jr., 799; and the media, 562; and Vietnam War, 981 Malone, Annie Turnbo, 779 Mamiya, Lawrence H., 98 Mandela, Nelson, 275 Manley, Norman, 701 Mann, Woodrow, 546, 774 Mansfield, Michael H., 942 March on Selma, 911 March on Washington, 209, 211, 911; and “I Have a Dream” speech, 449-454; and National Urban League, 661; and Randolph, A. Philip, 1118; and Rustin, Bayard, 1120 March on Washington movement, 341, 719, 1020 Margold, Nathan, 771 Mariel boatlift, 272 Marrant, John, 379 Marshall, Thurgood, 13, 65, 641, 644,

1168

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Subject Index

771, 792, 812, 918, 1115; appointed to Supreme Court, 564-568; and Johnson, Lyndon B., 1111; retirement of, 928 Martin v. Wilks, 568 Martinet, Louis, 709 Mary, Alexander A., 709 Maryland; demographics, 291 Mason, James, 388 Massachusetts; abolitionism, 7; Freemasons, 377-381; and fugitive slave laws, 385; and slave trade, 868; slavery, 59, 865-869 Matney, William C., Jr., 574 Matthew, Wentworth Arthur, 115 May, Samuel, 42 Mays, Benjamin, 508 Mays, Willie, 901 Meagher, Timothy, 236 Media, 569-576; and Black Panther Party, 124; and Civil Rights movement, 92-93, 374, 488, 573, 727, 799, 910; and Congressional Black Caucus, 256; and Farrakhan, Louis, 594; and King, Martin Luther, Jr., 251; and lynching, 556; and Malcolm X, 562; and Million Man March, 594; and music, 624-631; and Simpson murder trial, 813-818; and stereotypes, 900-901; and Thomas-Hill hearings, 928-930; and University of Mississippi, 976; and Wilder, L. Douglas, 1011 Medical sciences, 781 Memphis; radio stations, 573; riots, 737-741 Memphis Free Speech, 1124 Mennonites, 705 Men’s liberation, 335 Meredith, James H., 129, 375, 646, 974-979, 1115 Meredith v. Fair, 646 Metro Broadcasting v. Federal Communications Commission, 22 Mexican War, 244, 387, 851 Mfume, Kweisi, 1093, 1095 Miami riots of 1980, 272, 576-579, 752

Micheaux, Oscar, 353 Michigan, 696 Military conscription, 580, 587, 980, 1023; and Ali, Muhammad, 982; Civil War, 228, 298-302; World War II, 1020 Military desegregation, 278, 455, 579, 583-591; and Randolph, A. Philip, 1118 Military history, 579-583; Brownsville incident, 145-146; buffalo soldiers, 147-150; desegregation of defense industries, 277-283; Vietnam War, 979-983; World War II, 1020-1025 Military Reconstruction Acts of 1867, 716 Militia Act of 1862, 298 Miller, Samuel F., 819 Miller v. Johnson, 396 Milliken v. Bradley, 592-593 Million Man March, 593-597, 634; and Chavis, Benjamin, 1101 Million Woman March, 597-600 Minimum wage laws, 36, 289; and agricultural workers, 310 Minor v. Happersett, 761 Minority business enterprises, 391 Minority “set asides,” 392 Minstrel shows, 476, 626-627; and basketball, 893 Miscegenation laws, 600-603, 699; banning of, 712 Mississippi, 374, 603, 910; bombings, 169; and Council of Federated Organizations, 260-267; demographics, 291, 399; elected officials, 722; elections, 718, 984; Freedom Summer, 374-377; Jim Crow laws, 477; lynching, 554; poll taxes, 435; and slave trade, 417; University of Mississippi, 974-979 Mississippi Burning (film), 376, 527, 1018 Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party, 375, 603-606, 911, 1098, 1108

Subject Index Mississippi University for Women v. Hogan, 21 Missouri Compromise, 61, 244, 492, 606-611, 783, 851; and KansasNebraska Act, 490 Missouri ex rel. Gaines v. Canada, 141, 612 Mitchell, Arthur W., 718-719 Mitchell, Clarence, 195 Mitchell, Parren, 167 Mitchell, William H., 951 Mobile, Alabama, 236, 742; curfew, 477; elections, 613; riot, 741-745 Mobile v. Bolden, 613, 988 “Model” minorities, 1003 Monagas, Lionel, 573 Mondale, Walter F., 343, 462-465 Monroe, James, 610 Montgomery bus boycott, 204, 209, 614-619, 1096, 1117 Moore v. Dempsey, 619-620, 640 Moose Lodge v. Irvis, 151, 620-621, 813 Morgan v. Virginia, 481 Morley, Burton R., 742 Morrison, Toni, 542-543, 1116 Moses, Robert, 261 Motley, Constance Baker, 646, 1004 Motown Records, 629, 1107 Mott, Lucretia, 8 MOVE, Philadelphia police bombing of, 621-623 Movies. See Films Moynihan, Daniel Patrick, 468, 623, 845 Moynihan Report, 623-624 Muhammad, Elijah, 120, 539, 631635, 1116; and Malcolm X, 559564, 1115 Muhammad, Warith “Wallace,” 634 Muhammad Speaks, 562 Murray, Anna, 689 Murray, Anna E., 241 Murrow, Edward R., 573 Music, 624-631; and Harlem Renaissance, 426-433; and radio, 572, 628-629; and slavery, 840 Muslim Mosque, Inc., 563 Mutual Black Network, 573

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1169

NAACP. See National Association for the Advancement of Colored People Nabrit, James M., Jr., 645 Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, 689 Nasser, Gamal Abdel, 701 Nation of Islam, 120, 474, 539, 559, 631-635; book publishing, 570; and Farrakhan, Louis, 1105; and Malcolm X, 1115; and Muhammad, Elijah, 1116 National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders, 153, 635-636, 678, 746, 751, 998 National Anti-Slavery Standard, 10, 691 National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, 70, 147, 302, 317, 341, 375, 556, 614, 636-643, 742, 746, 786, 792, 875, 912, 921, 1104; book publishing, 570; and Chavis, Benjamin, 1101; and Council of Federated Organizations, 260; and Evers, Medgar, 1105; and Farmer, James, 1105; and Hooks, Benjamin, 1108; and Johnson, James Weldon, 1110; and Jordan, Vernon, 1111; and lynching, 900; and Marshall, Thurgood, 1115; membership, 585; and Niagara Movement, 684; and Parks, Rosa, 1117; and restrictive covenants, 812; and school desegregation, 771; and Wells-Barnett, Ida B., 1124; and White, Walter, 1125; and Wilkins, Roy, 1125; and World War II, 1022 National Association for the Advancement of Colored People Legal Defense and Educational Fund, 140, 405, 592, 641, 643-649, 771 National Association for the Advancement of Colored People v. Alabama, 650-651 National Association of Colored Women, 241, 651-652

1170

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Subject Index

National Black Caucus of State Legislators, 721 National Black Feminist Organization, 242 National Black Network, 573 National Black Women’s Political Leadership Caucus, 652-653 National Coalition of Blacks for Reparations in America, 653-654 National Conference of Black Mayors, 721 National Council of Black Mayors, 721 National Council of Colored People, 654-657 National Council of Negro Women, 658-659, 1099 National Council of Women, 241 National League of Colored Women, 240-241 National League on Urban Conditions Among Negroes, 659 National Negro Business League, 306, 1106, 1124 National Organization for Women, 218 National Urban League, 659-661, 912; and Jordan, Vernon, 1111; and Wilder, L. Douglas, 1125; and Young, Whitney, 1126 Native Americans, 661-666; and buffalo soldiers, 147-150; and fugitive slaves, 947 Native Son (Wright), 542 N’COBRA. See National Coalition of Blacks for Reparations in America Negro Act of 1740, 905 Negro Conventions, 28, 655, 667-669, 1096 Negro Declaration of Independence, 682 Negro Digest, The, 571, 1111 Negro Factories Corporation, 972 Negro Leagues, 891 Negro World, The, 972 Negro Yearbook, The, 570 Neville, Dinah, 704

New England Anti-Slavery Society, 44, 922 New National Era, 692 “New Negro,” 429 New Orleans; Jim Crow laws, 477; riots, 737-741 New York; and fugitive slave laws, 385 New York Age, 1106 New York City; demographics, 399; Hawkins murder, 441-442; slave revolt, 669-674 New York Manumission Society, 60 New York riots, 674-676 Newark riots, 677-679, 751, 1001 Newberry v. United States, 418, 679681, 686, 958, 1009 Newspapers, 571; Black Panther, The, 127; Chicago Defender, 288, 309, 401; Commonwealth, 862; Freedom’s Journal, 571; Garvey’s Watchman, 970; Liberator, The, 2, 5, 532-537; Memphis Free Speech, 1124; Muhammad Speaks, 562; Mystery, The, 1103; National Anti-Slavery Standard, 10; Negro World, The, 972; New York Age, 1106; North Star, The, 571, 689-693; Provincial Freeman, The, 10 Newton, Huey P., 121, 124, 132, 1116 Niagara Movement, 317, 501, 637, 681-685, 920, 1104 Nicodemus, Kansas, 795 Nixon, L. A., 875 Nixon, Richard M.; and Chisholm, Shirley, 165-166; and Congressional Black Caucus, 256, 721; and school desegregation, 40; and Supreme Court, 915 Nixon v. Condon, 206, 418, 641, 685687, 876, 1009 Nixon v. Herndon, 205, 348, 418, 685687, 875, 1009 Nkrumah, Kwame, 701, 1101, 1104 NOI. See Nation of Islam Nonviolence, philosophy of, 908 Nonviolent direct action, 618 Nonviolent resistance, 618

Subject Index Norris, Isaac, 706 Norris v. Alabama, 687-688 North Carolina; elections, 718; Jim Crow laws, 477 North Star, The, 571, 689-693, 1104 Northwest Ordinance of 1787, 244, 382, 608, 694-698, 824, 851 Nott, Josiah, 734, 829 Oberlin College, 950 Oberlin Rescuers, 2 Office for Civil Rights, 216 Oglethorpe, James, 904 Ohio, 696 One-drop rule, 698-699 One person, one vote concept, 613 O’Neill, Eugene, 139, 1119 Operation Breadbasket, 462, 1109, 1121 Operation PUSH, 463, 1109 Opportunity, 660 Orangeburg massacre, 699-700 Ordinance of 1784, 694 Oregon v. Mitchell, 350 Organization for Black Americans to Support Israel, 1120 Organization of Afro-American Unity, 563, 1115 Owen, Robert Dale, 924 Owens, Jesse, 1116 Pacifism, 535 Padmore, George, 701 Paige, Satchel, 891 Paine, Thomas, 707 Palmer v. Thompson, 700-701 Pan-Africanism, 701-702; and Carmichael, Stokely, 1101 Pánfilo de Narváez, 662 Panic of 1837, 44 Paradise, United States v. See United States v. Paradise Parker, Theodore, 437 Parks, Rosa, 101, 209, 615-616, 1117 Patents, 777 Patterson, Frederick D., 953, 1117 Patterson, Mary Jane, 241 Patterson, Orlando, 826, 845 Patterson, Robert B., 1007

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1171

Patterson v. McLean Credit Union, 198, 702-703 Payne, Daniel Alexander, 1117 Payton, Philip A., Jr., 402 Peden, Katherine Graham, 746 Pemberton, Israel, 704 Pemberton, James, 704 Pennington, James, 655 Pennsylvania; and fugitive slave laws, 385; slavery in, 703 Pennsylvania Society for the Abolition of Slavery, 703-708 Peremptory challenge, 314 Persian Gulf War, 582 Person, Waverly, 781 Peters, Brock, 354 Phillips, Wendell, 535, 832, 924 Pickering, William, 608 Picket, Bill, 268 Pierce, Franklin, 134, 490, 494 Pilmore, Joseph, 366 Pilots, 937-939 Pinchback, P. B. S., 716, 1014 Plessy, Homer Adolph, 709 Plessy v. Ferguson (1896), 140, 180, 207, 258, 478, 641, 708-713, 791, 917; and schools, 770; and separate but equal doctrine, 805 Poets, 540; and abolitionist movement, 10; and Harlem Renaissance, 427, 431 Poitier, Sidney, 354, 1004 Police brutality, 93, 126, 153, 274, 450, 509, 516, 548; and King, Rodney, 515-519; and riots, 272, 548-552, 576-579, 677, 739, 745749, 751-752, 1000; and Scottsboro case, 788 Politics and government, 713-723 Poll taxes, 205-206, 296, 347, 718, 723-725, 961, 1018; banning of, 435-436, 941-947, 990; and grandfather clauses, 398-399; Mississippi, 294-298; and Twentyfourth Amendment, 941-947; and Voting Rights Act of 1965, 983, 986 Poor People’s Campaign, 1001

1172

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Subject Index

Poor People’s March, 725-727 Port Chicago incident, 1023 Porters, 138-140, 279, 309, 401 Poverty, 675, 725-727; and race, 320, 330, 623 Powell, Adam Clayton, 130 Powell, Adam Clayton, Jr., 1117 Powell, Colin, 582, 1003, 1118; and Vietnam War, 982 Powell, Isaac, 781 Powell, James, 674 Powell, Laurence, 516 Powell, Lewis F., Jr., 19; Batson v. Kentucky, 90; McCleskey v. Kemp, 557 Powell v. Alabama, 688, 727-728 Powers v. Ohio, 91, 728-729 President’s Committee on Civil Rights, 556, 719, 729-731, 1024, 1122 Price, Hugh, 661 Prigg v. Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, 385, 388 Private discrimination; Moose Lodge v. Irvis, 620 Project C, 92 Proposition 14, 343 Proslavery argument, 1, 437, 731735, 936 Provincial Freeman, The, 10 Public accommodations, desegregation of, 252 Public Health Service, U.S., 939-940 Public schools; desegregation of, 192, 913 Public Works Employment Act of 1977, 392 Puritans, 537, 866, 869 Purvis, Robert, 951 Purvis, W. B., 779 Quakers; and Underground Railroad, 950 Queen Anne’s War, 672 Quotas. See Affirmative action Race; one-drop rule, 698-699 “Race music,” 572

Race relations; and slavery, 843-850 Race riots, 745-749 Race riots of 1866, 737-741 Race riots of 1943, 281 Race riots of the twentieth century, 635, 750-753 Racial discrimination; and White Citizens’ Councils, 1007-1009 Racism; and proslavery argument, 731-735 Radical Reconstructionism, 524 Radical Republicans, 524, 714 Radio broadcasting, 571; and music, 572, 628-629 Ragtime, 626 Rainbow Coalition, 462, 753-754 Rainey, Ma, 431 Randolph, A. Philip, 139, 279-280, 341, 450, 587, 719, 912, 1118; and March on Washington movement, 1020 Rap music, 630 R.A.V. v. City of St. Paul, 735-736 Rayburn, Sam, 888 Read, George, 383 Reagan, Ronald; and affirmative action, 22; and civil rights, 218, 957; and Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, 339; and Haitians, 423; and Jackson, Jesse, 462-463; and Powell, Colin, 1118 Reapportionment, 397 Reconstruction, 248, 359, 524, 529, 714, 755-763, 790; Colfax massacre, 239-240; Compromise of 1877, 248-249; and Hayes, Rutherford B., 1108; Jim Crow laws, 476-479; race riots, 737-741; and sharecropping, 806-808; Slaughterhouse Cases, 819-820; and Stevens, Thaddeus, 1121 Reconstruction Acts, 201 Red Scare, 525 Redding, Louis, 645 Redistricting, 808-811; and gerrymandering, 393-397 Redlining, 344

Subject Index Reed, Ishmael, 543 Reese, United States v. See United States v. Reese Refugees; Cuban, 421; U.S. policy, 273, 421 Regents of the University of California v. Bakke. See Bakke case Rehnquist, William H., 1019; Martin v. Wilks, 568; Moose Lodge v. Irvis, 620; Shaw v. Hunt, 809 Reitman v. Mulkey, 343, 763-765 Reparations; and National Coalition of Blacks for Reparations in America, 653-654; and Republic of New Africa, 765 Republic of New Africa, 765-766 Republican Party, 247, 357, 420, 494, 536; and Reconstruction, 714 Restrictive covenants, 340, 766-767, 812-813 Restrictive or racial covenants, 480 Resurrection City, 725 Revels, Hiram R., 717, 926 Revivalism, 78 Reynolds, Grant, 279 Reynolds, Humphrey, 779 Rhode Island; and fugitive slave laws, 385 Rhythm and blues, 628 Rice, Condoleezza, 1118-1119 Rice, Thomas D. “Big Daddy,” 476 Richmond v. J. A. Croson Company, 21, 198 Rickey, Branch, 82-90 Rillieux, Norbert, 778 Riots, 211, 741-745; Los Angeles, 9991001; Memphis, 737-741; New Orleans, 737-741 Robb, Charles S., 1011 Roberts, Owen J., 876 Robeson, Paul, 572, 892, 1119 Robinson, Elizabeth, 8 Robinson, Jackie, 82-90, 892, 1024, 1119 Robinson, Spotswood W., III, 645 Rock and roll, 628 Rodgers, Jonathan, 574 Rogers v. Lodge, 613 Rome v. United States, 350

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1173

Romney, George, 747 Roosevelt, Eleanor, 94 Roosevelt, Franklin D., 278, 341, 746, 1120; and Bethune, Mary McLeod, 1099; and Black cabinet, 94; and Davis, Benjamin O., Sr., 1103; and the Depression, 35; desegregation of defense industries, 277-283; election of, 719; and military segregation, 585; and World War II, 1020 Roosevelt, Theodore, 1124; and Brownsville incident, 145-146; in Spanish-American War, 149 Roots (Haley) , 767-768, 1097, 1107 Runyon v. McCrary, 480, 703, 768-770 Rush, Benjamin, 365, 704, 922 Russell, Richard B., 186, 942-944 Russwurm, John B., 571 Rustin, Bayard, 155, 450, 481-490, 881-882, 1120 Sacagawea, 664 Sackler, Howard, 1110 St. George’s Methodist Episcopal Church, 26, 98, 363 Sanborn, Franklin B., 437 Savoy Ballroom, 428 Schnell v. Davis, 348 School busing, 167, 404-405, 456, 506-507, 592-593, 913-917; and Ku Klux Klan, 527; and Nixon, Richard M., 915 School desegregation, 768-776; Little Rock crisis, 544-548, 774; and White Citizens’ Councils, 10071009 Schwerner, Michael Henry, 219-225, 254, 263, 375, 472, 908 Science and technology, 776-782 SCLC. See Southern Christian Leadership Conference Scott, Dred, 783-786, 1120 Scott, Winfield, 490 Scott v. Sandford, 200, 396, 783-786, 923, 1120 Scottsboro cases, 687-688, 727-728, 786-790

1174

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Subject Index

Screvane, Paul, 676 Seale, Bobby, 121, 124, 1116, 1121 Second Amendment, 180 Secret Six, 437 Sectionalism, 244 Security Act of 1739, 903 Sedgwick, Theodore, 383 Segregation, 150, 372, 674, 790-793, 848, 890; de facto and de jure, 790; Jim Crow laws, 476-479; and Plessy v. Ferguson, 708-713; restrictive covenants, 766-767 Segregation on the frontier, 793-797 Self-incrimination, immunity against, 144 Selma-Montgomery march, 209, 797804 Seminole Wars, 662, 664 Separate but equal doctrine, 192, 208, 552, 612, 614, 641, 791, 805806; Cumming v. Richmond County Board of Education, 276-277; and education, 917-918; McLaurin v. Oklahoma State Regents for Higher Education, 558; and Plessy v. Ferguson, 708-713 Separate spheres, 6 Set-asides, 14 Seventy, The, 44 Seymour, Horatio, 301 Shabazz, El-Hajj Malik El- (Malcolm X), 1115 Sharecropping, 33, 35-36, 308, 327, 806-808, 834, 846; demise of, 310; and demographics, 289 Sharpe, John, 671 Sharpton, Al, 270, 1121 Shaw v. Hunt, 808-810 Shaw v. Reno, 396, 809-811 Shelley v. Kraemer, 147, 480, 766, 812813 Shelton, Robert, 527 Sheridan Broadcasting, 573 Shores family, 796 Shuttlesworth, Fred, 881 Simmons, William J., 525 Simpson, Nicole Brown, 814 Simpson, O. J., 768, 813-818

Sister’s Magazine, 659 Sixteenth Street Baptist Church, bombing of, 215 Slaughterhouse Cases, 710, 758, 819820 Slave codes, 821-826, 855; Massachusetts, 866; Ohio, 824; South Carolina, 905; Virginia, 821, 854, 870 Slave narratives, 537, 839 Slave rebellions, 48, 669, 750 Slave trade, 235, 828, 831; Clotilde capture, 234-239; demographics of, 283, 286; and economy, 304; internal, 246, 304, 417; outlawing of, 922 Slavery, 202, 226, 249, 327, 826-835, 850; and agriculture, 32, 304; of American Indians, 662; “badges and incidents,” 202, 480; and citizenship, 783-786; and Civil War, 323-326, 851; in Connecticut, 60; cotton gin and, 60; demographics of, 283, 285-286; and Emancipation Proclamation, 323-326; and families, 835-843; in Georgia, 61; Great Awakening and, 78; and illiteracy, 569, 855; and justice system, 850-857; legalization of, 821, 870; in Massachusetts, 59, 865-869; and national politics, 713; and Native Americans, 664; in New Hampshire, 59; in New Jersey, 60; in New York, 60, 669; and Northwest Ordinance, 694-698; in Northwest Territory, 823; in Pennsylvania, 59; proslavery argument, 731-735; and race relations, 828, 843-850; and reparations, 653-654; in Rhode Island, 59; in South Carolina, 61; and Thirteenth Amendment, 922927; and U.S. Constitution, 382, 852; and Underground Railroad, 947-952; in Vermont, 59; in Virginia, 870-875; and women, 858-865

Subject Index Smith, Barbara, 242 Smith, Bessie, 428, 431 Smith, Beverly, 242 Smith, Gerrit, 437, 692, 853 Smith, James McCune, 655 Smith, Lamar, 261 Smith v. Allwright, 206, 348, 641, 686687, 875-879, 1010 SNCC. See Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee Social reform movements and women, 6 Society of Free People of Color, 28, 365 Society of Friends (Quakers), 5-6, 59, 704, 922, 950 Sons of Liberty, 229 Soto, Hernando de, 662 Soul City, 1115 Soul on Ice (Cleaver), 1102 Souls of Black Folk, The (Du Bois), 70, 539 South Carolina; bombings, 169; demographics, 399; elections, 718, 984; Jim Crow laws, 477; slave trade, 61, 285; Stono Rebellion, 902-907 South Carolina v. Katzenbach, 350, 530, 987 Southern Christian Leadership Conference, 209, 375, 450, 618, 879-887, 908, 1096; Birmingham March, 91-94; and Chavis, Benjamin, 1101; and Council of Federated Organizations, 260; and Jackson, Jesse, 1109; and King, Martin Luther, Jr., 1112; and Lowery, Joseph E., 1114; and Poor People’s March on Washington, 725-727; and Rustin, Bayard, 1120; and Selma-Montgomery march, 798; and Young, Andrew, 1126 Southern Conference of Black Mayors, 721 Southern Manifesto, 773, 887-889 Southern Poverty Law Center, 1099 Southern Tenant Farmers Union, 36 Southern Workman, The, 570

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1175

Sowell, Thomas, 456, 468, 1002 Spanish-American War, 149, 277, 583 Sparks, Chauncey, 742 Spingarn, Joel E., 638, 640 Spirituals, 625 Spoils system, 492 Sports, 889-898; Ali, Muhammad, 1096; Johnson, Jack, 1110; Owens, Jesse, 1116; Robinson, Jackie, 1119 Springfield, Illinois; race riot, 683 Stanton, Edwin McMasters, 300 Stanton, Elizabeth Cady, 927 Stanton, Frederick P., 135 States’ rights, 208, 246, 389, 610 States’ Rights Party (Dixiecrats), 720 Stearns, George Luther, 437 Steele, Charles Kenzie, 881 Steele, Shelby, 848 Steinberg, Stephen, 468 Stephens, Alexander, 494 Stereotypes, 353, 898-902 Stevens, Thaddeus, 1121 Stewart, Potter, 414, 480; Mobile v. Bolden, 613 Stokes, Carl B., 721 Stone, John M., 295 Stone, Lucy, 8, 10, 927 Stoneman, George, 739 Stono Rebellion, 902-907 Stowe, Harriet Beecher, 862 Strauder v. West Virginia, 760, 907 Stringfellow, Thornton, 733 Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, 117, 129, 210, 375, 908-912, 1100; and Carmichael, Stokely, 1101; and Council of Federated Organizations, 260; founding of, 411; and Hamer, Fannie Lou, 1108; and SelmaMontgomery march, 798 Student rights movement, 132 Students for a Democratic Society, 133 Summit Meeting of National Negro Leaders, 912-913 Sumner, Charles, 201, 494 Supreme Court, U.S.; and Marshall, Thurgood, 564-568; on

1176

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Subject Index

redistricting, 395; and Thomas, Clarence, 1121 Sutherland, George; Powell v. Alabama, 728 Swain v. Alabama, 90 Swann v. Charlotte-Mecklenberg Board of Education, 456, 592, 913-917 Sweatt v. Painter, 141, 559, 612, 771, 792, 917-918 Syphilis, 939-940 Taft, William Howard, 1124 Talented Tenth, 318, 639, 919-921 Talton v. Mayes, 197 Tan, 571 Taney, Roger Brooke, 417 Tapisco, Jacob, 26 Tappan, Arthur, 42, 535 Taylor, Zachary, 246 Television broadcasting, 573; and Civil Rights movement, 573; impact of, 92, 130; Roots, 767-768 Temple, Lewis, 778 Tenant farming, 33 Tennessee; demographics, 291; Jim Crow laws, 477; Memphis riot, 737-741 Tennis, 895 Tenth Amendment, 925 Terrell, Mary Church, 241 Terry v. Adams, 348, 878, 921-922, 1010 Texas; Jim Crow laws, 477; lynching, 554-555; poll taxes, 435; riots, 743 Third Amendment, 180 Thirteenth Amendment, 2, 200, 203, 231, 358, 710, 755, 922-928; and Civil Rights cases, 202-204 Thomas, Clarence, 14, 928-930, 1121; and affirmative action, 22, 929; and Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, 339; and Hill, Anita, 1108 Thomas, Franklin, 1004 Thomas, J. B., 608 Thomas, United States v. See United States v. Thomas Thomas-Hill hearings, 928-930 Thompson, William C., 163

Thornburg v. Gingles, 988 Thornton, Charles B. (Tex), 746 Three-fifths compromise, 357, 360, 607, 697, 714, 852, 930-931 Thurmond, Strom, 445, 720, 888 Tilden, Samuel J., 248 Till, Emmett, 554, 931-932, 1122 To Kill a Mockingbird (film), 354 To Secure These Rights, 281, 587, 730731 Tobacco farming, 32, 286, 304 Toomer, Jean, 541 Toure, Kwame (Stokely Carmichael), 1101 Touré, Sékou, 1101 Townsend, Robert, 355 Trotter, William Monroe, 501, 637, 919 Truman, Harry S., 281, 1122; and civil rights, 455, 556, 585, 719, 729-731, 812, 1024, 1122; desegregation of military, 579, 587, 590 Trumbull, Lyman, 106 Truth, Sojourner, 11, 44, 862-863, 1122; and Douglass, Frederick, 11 Tubman, Harriet, 11, 44, 538, 863, 924, 950, 1122 Turner, Henry McNeal, 1123 Turner, Nat, 1123 Turner’s slave insurrection, 732, 933937 Tuskegee Airmen, 937-939, 1022; and Davis, Benjamin O., Jr., 1103 Tuskegee experiment, 939-940 Tuskegee Institute, 67, 108, 316, 570, 639, 953, 970; and Carver, George Washington, 779; and Patterson, Frederick D., 1117; and Washington, Booker T., 1124 Tustennuggee Emartha (Jim Boy), 664 Twenty-fourth Amendment, 941947, 990 UNCF. See United Negro College Fund Uncle Tom’s Cabin (Stowe), 390, 490, 862

Subject Index Underground Railroad, 44, 825, 863, 924, 947-952; and Tubman, Harriet, 1122; and women, 10-11 Understanding tests, 952-953 Underwood, Oscar, 303 UNIA. See Universal Negro Improvement Association Union League, 524, 716 United African Movement, 1121 United Auto Workers, 530-532, 746, 1021 United House of Prayer for All People, 1107 United Negro College Fund, 109, 953-954, 1111; and Patterson, Frederick D., 1117 United Negro Improvement Association; and Malcolm X, 1115 United States Colored Infantry Regiments, 147-150 United States Commission on Civil Rights, 954-958 United States v. Classic, 419, 876, 958959, 1010 United States v. Cruikshank, 201, 759, 959-960 United States v. Harris, 759 United States v. Paradise, 21 United States v. Reese, 759, 961 United States v. Thomas, 348 United Steelworkers of America v. Weber, 17, 962-968 Universal Negro Improvement Association, 120, 403, 560, 969974, 1106 University of Alabama, 978 University of California v. Bakke. See Bakke case University of Georgia, 978 University of Mississippi, 974-979, 1115 Up from Slavery (Washington), 538, 970, 1124 Urban unrest, 674, 677, 997 Urbanization, 112, 288-291; and labor, 311; and National Urban League, 659-661

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1177

Van Buren, Martin, 49 Vassa, Gustavas, 537 Venable, James, 527 Vermont; and fugitive slave laws, 385 Vietnam War, 212, 979-983; and Civil Rights movement, 981-982; and King, Martin Luther, Jr., 1113; and women, 980 Vietnamese Americans, 527 Villa, Pancho, 148 Vinson, Fred M., 142, 918 Virginia; bombings, 169; demographics, 291, 399; election of L. Douglas Wilder, 1010-1017; elections, 718; Jim Crow laws, 477; poll taxes, 435; slavery, 870875; Turner’s slave insurrection, 933-937 Virginia v. Rives, 761 Vote, right to, 347, 398 Voting rights, 183, 204, 294, 360, 419420, 529, 603, 716, 961, 1025-1026; and at-large elections, 613; and Civil Rights movement, 720; and disfranchisement, 717; and gerrymandering, 393-397; and grandfather clauses, 398-399; Lassiter v. Northampton County Board of Elections, 530; and poll taxes, 723-725; and understanding tests, 952-953; and White primaries, 418-419, 685687, 1009-1010 Voting Rights Act of 1965, 207, 212, 349, 435, 455, 720, 878, 956, 983989, 999; and Johnson, Lyndon B., 1111; and redistricting, 395; and Selma-Montgomery march, 797804; and understanding tests, 952-953 Voting Rights Act of 1975, 990-996 Wade, Wyn, 1008 Waite, Morrison R., 759 Walcott, Derek, 1004 Walker, Alice, 543, 1123 Walker, Madame C. J., 779

1178

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Subject Index

Walker v. City of Birmingham, 646 Wallace, George, 172, 800-801, 945, 991 Wallace, Henry, 588 Walthall, Edward C., 295 War Manpower Commission, 742 War Without Violence (Shridharani), 251 Ward, Samuel Ringgold, 367 Wards Cove Packing Company v. Atonio, 198, 416 Warmoth, Henry Clay, 717 Warren, Earl, 137, 208, 772, 1123; Brown v. Board of Education, 142 Washington, Booker T., 108, 316, 538, 639, 681, 919, 970, 1124; accommodationist program, 501; Atlanta Compromise, 67-70; and Du Bois, W. E. B., 1124; and Fortune, T. Thomas, 1106; and Garvey, Marcus, 970; and National Negro Business League, 306 Washington, D.C., riots, 997-999 Washington, George, 277, 377, 777; and slavery, 383-384, 950 Washington Colored Woman’s League, 240-241 Washington v. Davis, 996-997 Waters, Muddy, 628 Watts riot, 212, 751, 999-1002 Weaver, John D., 146 Weaver, Robert, 94 Webster, Daniel, 389 Wells, Benjamin, 26 Wells, James Madison, 739 Wells-Barnett, Ida B., 1124 Wesberry v. Sanders, 395 West, Cornel, 471 West Indians, 268-270, 1002-1006; Jamaicans, 466-469 Whatcoat, Richard, 363 Wheatley, Phillis, 540 Whig Party, 245, 490 Whipper, William, 951 White, Byron R.; Washington v. Davis, 996 White, Walter, 341, 585, 639, 744, 1022, 1125

White, William, 364 White Citizens’ Councils, 641, 10071009 White flight, 113 White League, 239 White primaries, 205, 348, 418-419, 641, 645, 680-681, 685-687, 958, 1009-1010; Smith v. Allwright, 875; Terry v. Adams, 921-922 White supremacist groups, 523 White supremacy, 171, 529 White v. Regester, 988 Whitfield, James H., 538 Whittier, John Greenleaf, 42 Wilberforce University, 1117 Wilder, L. Douglas, 1010-1017, 1125 Wilkins, Roy, 500, 639, 912, 1125 Williams, Eric, 701 Williams v. Mississippi, 1017-1018 Wilmington Ten, 1101 Wilmot Proviso, 244, 851 Wilson, Lionel, 1116 Winfrey, Oprah, 574 Winthrop, John, 866 Wisconsin, 696 Wisconsin v. Mitchell, 737, 1018-1019 Wise, Henry A., 439-440 Woman suffrage, 927 Women; in literature, 1123; Million Woman March, 597-600; National Association of Colored Women, 651-652; National Black Women’s Political Leadership Caucus, 652-653; National Council of Negro Women, 658-659; and slavery, 858-865; and Underground Railroad, 950; and Vietnam War, 980; Women’s movement, 242 Women’s Center for Education and Career Advancement, 658 Woods, Granville, 779 Woods, Tiger, 896 Woodson, Carter G., 32, 1125 Woodward, Isaac, 1024 World War I, 277; and Great Migration, 308

Subject Index World War II, 281, 1020-1025; and Civil Rights movement, 584; and labor, 467, 1021; and Louis, Joe, 894; and Muhammad, Elijah, 1116; and race riots, 741-745; Tuskegee Airmen, 937-939 Wright, Fielding, 720 Wright, Richard, 430, 542, 1125 Wyandotte Constitution, 136

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1179

Yama Craw Church, 80 Yarbrough, Ex parte, 760, 1025-1026 Yick Wo v. Hopkins, 1017 York, 663 Young, Andrew, 1015, 1126 Young, Whitney M., Jr., 661, 1126 Young Communist League, 1120 Zoning, 344 Zoot-suit riots, 743