Notable Movements, Organizations, Campaigns, and Institutions

1879 - 1881 - Exodus / Exodusters

• Social Movement in which up to 40K blacks migrated from the South to settle on federal land in Kansas thanks to the leadership and efforts of Blacks like Benjamin Pap Singleton, or the “Moses of the Colored Exodus”

• Social Movement which helped establish (four) all-Black farming communities in Kansas that grew into towns with businesses, churches, and schools

• Social Movement that was significant because it set the precedent for other mass migrations of Blacks, especially the Great Migration as well as

  • Prefigured later Black migrations that reshaped American demographics

  • Founded autonomous Black towns in the West

  • Represented the first major post-slavery Black migration

  • Protested political repression and racial violence in the South

  • Challenged Southern economic and labor system

  • Reopened national debates about federal protection of civil rights

1882 - 1938 - The Richmond Planet

• Founded by ex-slave John Mitchell Jr., it was the best known newspaper from there at the time

• Its pages addressed the issues of the day, including investigating lynchings and fighting against Black disenfranchisement in Virginia

  • It voiced opposition to the Spanish-American War, warning that US control of the Philippines would subject Filipinos to the same kind of racial repression that dominated the US South

1886 - Colored Farmers National Alliance and Cooperative Union

• Formed due to the fact that the Southern Farmers' Alliance did not allow Black farmers to join, which had over 1M members by 1891

• Organization that was significant for helping Black farmers

  • Unite to combat economic exploitation

  • Fight low crop prices

  • Advocate for better farming conditions

1889 - 1893 - Afro-American League

• Founded by T. Thomas Fortune

• It was one of the first national civil rights organizations formed after Reconstruction whose
  purpose was to organize African Americans against:

  • lynching

  • segregation laws

  • voting disfranchisement

  • racial violence

  • discrimination in public accommodations

• It was significant for bringing Black leaders from across the country together in an era when Jim Crow was tightening and political rights were collapsing and because it

  • Was the first national civil rights organization formed after Reconstruction

  • Fought early battles against lynching, segregation, and disfranchisement

  • Served as a direct precursor to the NAACP

  • Pioneered national Black political organizing at a time of rising Jim Crow repression and helped shape the strategies and leadership that later defined the modern civil rights movement

1896 - National Association of Colored Women (NACW) / Black Women’s Club Movement

• Epitomized the increased emphasis placed by Blacks of the era on the “politics of respectability” - the notion that striving for and achieving respectability promoted the cause of their race

• Dedicated themselves to programs of self-help

• They were significant for their work in

  • Working to abolish lynching

  • Developing programs for advancing Black education through fundraising, scholarships, and grants

  • Offering community-based assistance to Black women in areas such as jobs, child care, temperance, health, and hygiene

  • Supporting women’s suffrage

  • Fighting against the discriminatory Jim Crow laws and practices, including the convict-lease system that forced Black men and women to work on plantations and factories

• They also distinguished themselves as a new social class in the South - as elite Black women - and thus from the lower classes of Black women who did not have the time or energy for such clubs

1897 - National Ex-Slave Mutual Relief, Bounty, and Pension Association / NESMRBPA

• National organization led primarily by formerly enslaved African-Americans whose goals were to

  • Obtain federal pensions for formerly enslaved people and that the federal government owed them compensation for:

    • Unpaid labor

    • Physical suffering

    • Economic exploitation

    • Lifelong denial of Rights

  • Provide mutual aid elderly African-Americans by offering

    • Burial funds

    • Sick benefits

    • Small cash payments

    • Community support

  • Advocate for recognition of slavery’s legacies in which they

    • Held conventions

    • Wrote petitions

    • Gathered thousands of members across the South and Midwest

• National organization that was significant because it

  • Was the first nationwide reparations movement led by formerly enslaved African Americans

  • Empowered Black leadership, especially Black women, such as Callie House

  • Exposed the economic injustices left unresolved after emancipation

  • Laid the foundations for modern reparations activism

1900 - Pan-African Congress

• International meeting in London which addressed the welfare of Africans around the world and argued for an end to European colonization of Africa

• Meeting which was significant because it

  • Was the first international political meeting of people of African descent in history

  • Launched Pan-Africanism as an organized movement

  • Laid foundations for African independence and global Black activism

1900 - National Negro Business League (NNBL)

• Founded by Booker T. Washington

• Organization that fostered economic empowerment for African-Americans through business development, networking, and advocating for Black-owned enterprises

• Organization which grew into hundreds of chapters

• Organization that tailored to Black entrepreneurs, professionals, and farmers that wished to promote self-sufficiency and inclusion in the national economy

• Organization that was significant for being the first major nationwide organization dedicated to Black economic advancement and which helped grow a Black middle-class and strengthened Black business districts during the Jim Crow era

1905 - Niagara Movement

• Militant protest organization committed to revitalizing a national Black Civil Rights agenda in opposition to Booker T. Washington’s Accomodationism with goals to promote

  • Voting rights

  • Equal educational opportunities

  • End to segregation

  • “Persistent manly agitation” as “the way to liberty”

• Movement which, undermined by infighting and Washington’s powerful opposition, achieved few tangible results

• Movement which was significant because it

  • Was the first major civil rights organization of the 20th century

  • Challenged Booker T. Washington’s accommodationist approach

  • Laid the ideological and organizational groundwork for the NAACP

1905 - Present - The Chicago Defender

• Newspaper which many Southern Blacks wrote to about their hopes for migrating to the north, as 2/3 of its circulation was outside the paper’s namesake city base

• Newspaper which not only promoted migration but also listed jobs and train schedules

• Newspaper which also pressured the US army into establishing two Black combat divisions during WW1

• Newspaper which presented images of Emmet Till’s body in the coffin for all to see

• Newspaper which was significant for publishing many articles that motivated Blacks to come to the North to look for jobs and which culminated in the First Great Migration and thus it was famous for its thorough promotion of migration during that period

1907 - 1966 - The Pittsburgh Courier

• By the 1930s, it became one of the leading Black newspapers in the US

• Newspaper which was significant for announcing the “Double V” Campaign, in which African-Americans would fight against fascism abroad and racism at home

1909 - National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP)

• Founded by WEB DuBois, it was / is the leading advocacy group for Black Civil Rights up to the present

  • However, he eventually left as views became more radical than theirs

• It was significant because it employed a strategy of litigation to help achieve progress for African-Americans, especially when it utilized the 14th and 15th Amendments for many cases

• It was the organization which combined five legal cases against educational segregation into one class action suit known as Brown v. Board

• It was significant because it was vital to national efforts to end lynching, a nationwide campaign of which it made a priority by 1919

1910 - Present - National Urban League / NUL

• Organization dedicated to assisting Black migrants from the South and to advancing the concerns of urban Blacks

• Organization that was significant for emerging as a vital organization advancing the concerns of urban Blacks and the Black freedom struggle, it became heavily associated with the New Negro Movement

• Organized that was significant because it

  • Supported African-Americans during the Great Migration

  • Fought employment and housing discrimination

  • Became a major force in the Civil Rights Movement’s push for economic justice

  • Was one of the most influential civil rights organizations of the 20th century

1913 - Alpha Suffrage Club

• Founded by Ida B Wells

• It provided Black women a platform to fight for voting rights while also

  • Advocating for Black political power and representation

  • Educating members on civic duty

  • Challenging racial exclusion within the broader suffrage movement

  • Organizing Black women to use their votes to elect candidates who served their community's interests, even facing racism within white-led suffrage groups

• It was significant because it was the first African-American women’s suffrage organization

1914 - Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA)

• Founded by Marcus Garvey, it was an international organization that promoted

  • Race Pride

  • Racial Unity

  • Black Separatism

  • African redemption

  • Black Self-Determination

  • Independent Black nation building

• In terms of Black elevation, it was the largest and most militant of the organizations

• By 1921, it claimed 4M members in 30 chapters in the US and West Indies

• Unique to the association was the message of African redemption, the restoration of African independence and greatness, and Pan-Africanism, the essential oneness of all African people, wherever they lived

• It was significant because it helped African-Americans recognize both the African and American components of their identity, to see themselves in such an international context, and to feel that they were part of a global Black movement

• It served as a sharp separatist contrast to the integrationist NAACP organization

1919 - African Blood Brotherhood (ABB)

• Founded by Cyril Briggs

• Organization that advocated

  • Armed self-defense

  • Black Nationalism

  • Anti-colonialism

  • Socialism

  • Blending race consciousness with Marxist ideals to fight white supremacy and capitalism

• Organization that served as a key link for Black radicals entering the Communist Party in the US

• Organization that convinced Lenin of the USSR that Black people’s struggle in the US was an anticolonial struggle

• Organization that was significant because it

  • Challenged racial violence

  • Promoted socialism

  • Linked African Americans to global anti-colonial movements, like that within the USSR

1925 - Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters and Maids

• Black Labor Union formed to represent the rights of low-paid Black railroad workers

• Was used as an organizational base for promoting both the rights of Blacks and the rights of labor and by 1937, the AFL recognized the Union

• It was significant because it was the first successful African-American labor union to win a contract with a major U.S. corporation (the Pullman Company)

1930 - Nation of Islam

• Led by Elijah Muhammad at the time of Malcolm X’s heyday

• Organization that Malcolm X was involved in but eventually assassinated by after breaking off and forming his own organization, the secular Organization of Afro-American Unity

• Organization remembered for its newspaper “Muhammad Speaks,” which disseminated new ideas about Blacks being a proud people, a nation within a nation that needed to exercise more control over its economic well-being and to be more militant in the exercise of political power

• Organization that was significant because it

  • Produced Malcolm X, who helped shape the Black Power Movement

  • Broadened the Civil Rights Movement by offering an alternative, more militant vision of liberation and transformed Black political and cultural identity via Black Power

  • Advocated self-defense and self-sufficiency

1936 - National Negro Congress

• Founded by John P. Davis

• An umbrella organization of Black organizations whose first national meeting expressed a commitment to radical politics and militant labor organization and activism

• It functioned as the vanguard of collective Black liberal-left efforts to alleviate New Deal racism

• Working interracially whenever possibly, it also joined the fight against what many said was the growing threat of domestic as well as international fascism

• Fought for jobs, fair housing, and fair dispensation of relief

• Through a network of local councils, it proved particularly effective at promoting interracial unionism, especially the concerns of Black industrial workers in a number of cities

1937 - 1949 - Southern Negro Youth Congress

• Was a radical, independent southern-based youth organization that grew out of and aligned itself with the National Negro Congress

• It promoted the interrelated concerns of Black youth specifically and Black people generally, framed around four core commitments: jobs, education, health, and citizenship

• Their wide-ranging agenda included

  • Union organizing

  • Legal aid

  • Antilynching

  • Antirape Activism

  • Voting Rights Activism, notably voter registration and the campaign to abolish the poll tax

  • Lobbying in Washington DC

  • Cultural activism throughout the rural Black South

• It was significant for providing a model for the SNCC and Black Power Movement, whose goals and activities it foreshadowed

1937 - Council on African Affairs

• US-based anti-colonial and Pan-Africanist organization, founded by Paul Robeson

• It was dedicated to

  • Informing Americans about African conditions,

  • Fighting apartheid in South Africa

  • Supporting African liberation movements against European colonial rule

• It worked for the

  • Struggle over economic rights

  • Internationalization of domestic civil rights

  • Decolonization of Africa and Asia

• It was significant because

1941 - March on Washington Movement

• Call for 50K to 100K Black Americans to gather in Washington DC by Asa Philip Randolph, to demand equal opportunity for Blacks in defense industries and the armed services

• Movement which was significant because it led to the FDR’s issuing Executive Order 8802, which banned racial discrimination in defense industries and created the Fair Employment Practices Commission (FEPC)

1941 - Congress of Racial Equality (CORE)

• Founded by Bayard Rustin

• It was a Civil Rights organization of interracial students in Chicago that worked to fight racial discrimination through nonviolent protests

• Organization that was significant for its many accomplishments including having

  • Sponsored the “Freedom Rides,” in which interracial groups rode buses through the segregated South to challenge discriminatory laws, forcing the federal government to enforce Supreme Court rulings against segregation in interstate travel, despite facing brutal violence, bombings, and arrests

    • This pushed the federal government to enforce desegregation in interstate travel as a result of the Freedom Rides

  • Played a crucial role in the sit-in movement and Freedom Summer

  • Contributed significantly to the passage of the Civil Rights Act and Voting Rights Act

  • Helped organize the March on Washington

  • Advocated Black Power

1942 - Double V Campaign

• Campaign initiated by the Pittsburg Courier Newspaper editor James G. Thompson which committed to African-Americans fight against racism and for liberty at home and fight against fascism and for liberty abroad

• Campaign that was significant because it

  • Provided a masterful way to fight racism without endangering civil liberties

  • Provided a way for Blacks to be simultaneously patriotic and fight for Black rights

  • Provided a symbol that became popular within Black Culture, and initiated a culture of its own in which pamphlets, clothes, bumper stickers, etc. were made to promote and maintain it

1946 - 1955 - Women’s Political Council

• Black middle-class women’s organization led by Jo Ann Robinson

• They initially called a one-day bus boycott after the arrest of Claudette Colvin

• It was significant for its plans it made to boycott Montgomery Alabama’s buses and their support of Rosa Parks after she refused to relinquish her seat

• They were also significant because they conformed to the pressure of the overall CRM to having Rosa Parks rather than Claudette Colvin be used as the face of the bus boycotts, showing that even amongst women’s organizations there were tendencies to not showcase women’s struggles publicly

1955 - Montgomery Improvement Association

• Organization which set up carpool networks and makeshift taxis in response to the Montgomery Bus Boycott of the same year

• Organization that was significant because it orchestrated and oversaw the Montgomery Bus Boycott against racial segregation

• It pioneered nonviolent protest and became a key force for fighting for civil rights

1957 - Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC)

• Founded in Atlanta and presided over by MLK, it was a church-based organization whose number one goal was to secure voting rights

• It essentially served as the political arm of the Black church

• It was significant for its many accomplishments including

  • Its victory in the Birmingham Campaign (1963) and Selma Voting Rights Campaign (1865) which both pushed Congress to pass the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and Voting Rights Act of 1965

  • Co-leading the March on Washington

  • Training thousands in nonviolent direct action

  • Promoting the Poor People’s Campaign

1960 - Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC)

• Youth-led civil rights organization which emerged from the student sit-in movement that

• Coordinated

  • nonviolent protests

  • voter registration drives (like Freedom Summer)

  • grassroots organizing

• In the 1970s, under the leadership of Stokely Carmichael, it shifted from the nonviolence and integrationism of Civil Rights to the violence and separatism of Black Power

• It was significant for its many accomplishments including having

  • Continued to sponsor the Freedom Rides when CORE members were diminishing

  • Organized many sit-ins

  • Built the most powerful grassroots Voting-rights campaigns in the South, especially in Mississippi

  • Founded the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party

  • Laid crucial groundwork for the Voting Rights Act of 1965

  • Helped popularize the idea of Black Power

1962 - Revolutionary Action Movement (RAM)

• Founded by a group of students in Ohio led by Maxwell Stanford, which strongly supported

  • Armed self-defense for Blacks

  • The national liberation movements in Africa, Asia, and Latin America

• Organization which saw themselves as being engaged in an anticolonial war with the American nation-state and believed their first duty was to defend themselves and monitor police activity in their neighborhoods

• Organization which developed a 12-point program which called for

  • Independent Black schools

  • National Black student organizations

  • Rifle clubs

  • Guerrilla army made up of young people and the unemployed

  • Black farmer cooperatives that fostered economic self-sufficiency

• Organization that was significant for fostering the philosophy of Black Nationalism - the idea that Black people constituted a nation within a nation, and that their survival depends on the exercise of Black power

• Organization that was significant because it

  • Pioneered early Black Power and Black Nationalist ideology

  • Promoted armed self-defense

  • Linked Black struggles to global anti-colonialism

  • Shaped a generation of Black activists

  • Influenced larger groups like SNCC and the Black Panther Party

  • Became an early target of government repression

1964 - Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party (MFDP)

• Led by Fannie Lou Hamer

• It was an independent, nondiscriminatory political party established to represent Black Mississippians at the 1964 Democratic National Convention

• They planned to challenge the state’s all-White segregationist delegation at the Democratic National Convention of that year; however, they were offered only two at-large seats on the convention floor, preventing their official participation in the convention

• It was significant for its having

  • Influenced Black Mississippians like Hamer that Whites were hindering political progress for Blacks, even when they worked alongside them

  • Influenced Black Mississippians that the rules needed to be changed, since they played by them and it accomplished little to nothing

1964 - Mississippi Freedom Summer Project

• It was a massive education and voter registration campaign

• ¾ of its employees were White

• During the summer it ran, the Blacks and Whites that organized the MFDP caucuses, county assemblies, and convention were meant with unrelenting terror in that people had died and lost jobs and homes for the cause

• It was significant for its having

  • Influenced Black Mississippians like Fannie Lou Hamer that Whites were hindering political progress for Blacks, even when they worked alongside them

  • Influenced Black Mississippians that the rules needed to be changed, since they played by them and it accomplished little to nothing

1964 - Deacons for Defense and Justice

• Was an armed grassroots organization formed in Mississippi and Louisiana to protect Black people against increased KKK activity

• Organization that was significant because they provided the protection that was needed, sought, and appreciated by Black national leaders and organization in their pursuit of nonviolent passive resistance

  • For example, they were accepted by Black Power marchers for their protection during the (continued) March Against Fear

1967 - 1968 - Poor People’s Campaign

• Movement led by MLK and the SCLC which sought to bring 1500 protestors to Washington DC to lobby Congress and other government agencies for a $30B antipoverty package from the US Government, a package which would include a(n)

  • Commitment to full employment

  • Guaranteed annual income measure

  • Increased construction of low-income housing

• Movement that was significant because it significantly expanded the Civil Rights Movement’s focus on racial justice to economic justice and tried to unite the poor of all races

1966 - 1982 - Black Panther Party

• It is significant for its fight against police repression, its central mission

  • To resist police harassment and brutality, its members carried unconcealed weapons and adopted the policy of following and monitoring the police

  • They carried loaded, unconcealed weapons while patrolling Black neighborhoods and monitoring the activities of local police

  • The chapter in Oakland was the most influential, especially with its “Ten Point Program” which embodied many of the principles that Black Power and Black Nationalism had came to represent

• It is significant for creating its “Survival Programs,” in which they created and maintained 26 programs for providing breakfasts and free medical clinics, bodyguards for the elderly, community service, etc.

  • They argued that a child could not learn if they did not have food in their stomachs

  • The Federal government at the time grew jealous of how well they were doing what they did and worked to get rid of it and then adopt their policies for itself, except it turned the free medical clinics into “low-cost” clinics; and then Reagan did away with all these programs

• They ran their namesake newspaper, the highest-selling Black newspaper at the time, along with a confederation of other Black organizations that worked to fight poverty and police brutality

• Helped create the “Rainbow Coalition”

• First group to endorse the LGBTQ community

• Clad in black leather jackets and black berets, they projected a hypermasculine identity meant to reclaim a “manhood” that, they argued, White America had robbed them of for centuries

1968 - 1980 - Third World Women’s Alliance

• Organized that emerged out of the SNCC due to it challenging that organization’s sexism and male-centeredness

  • After they split, one of the first issues they addressed was the 1965 Moynihan Report, a federal government document which blamed Black women for the decline of the Black family

• Organization that was significant due to its having

  • Established solidarity with Asian, Puerto Rican, Native American, and Mexican American women which demonstrated the interrelatedness of women’s rights and international liberation struggles

  • Defended homosexual individuals on an international level, especially amongst the namesake kind of countries where they were most endangered for their sexual orientation

“Black Cabinet”

• More formally known as the “Federal Council on Negro Affairs,” it was organized by Mary McLeod Bethune

• It was a group of influential Black policy advisors who met at her home to discuss civil rights and help shape the New Deal’s response to Black concerns

“Don’t Buy Where You Can’t Work”

• Campaign by Adam Clayton Powell Jr. to pressure New York stores to hire Black employees

• It started as a 1930s grassroots campaign that fought for the hiring of Blacks in white-owned stores in Black communities

March on Washington Movement

• Organized by A. Philip Randolph during WW2 to force FDR’s hand

COINTELPRO

• FBI Counterintelligence Program under which J. Edgar Hoover initiated Antiblack operations against “Black Nationalist, hate-type organizations” and launched systematic covert actions including infiltration, psychological warfare, legal harassment, and violence, not only against the Black Liberation movement, but also against the American Indian Movement, Puerto Rican independence movement, and the antiwar and student movements of the 1960s

  • Agency which became a danger to the very democracy it was supposed to protect

• Program which was significant because it showed the extent to which the US federal government were putting their resources towards targeting different Black groups, and it undermined multiple Black groups including the Black Panthers, the SNCC, the SCLC, CORE, RAM, and other groups

All-Black Towns

Massive Resistance

• Widespread strategy adopted by the American South, to block school desegregation after the 1954 Brown v. Board decision by

  • Using laws to close integrated schools

  • Creating private academies

  • Intimidation

  • Using economic threats to maintain white supremacy and racial segregation in education and public life

• Strategy which functioned on two levels

  • Legal- state and private action

    • Exemplified by organizations like the White Citizen’s Council

    • 120 pro-segregation acts were passed, sought to follow “lawful resistance”

  • Illegal - racial terrorism

    • Exemplified by organizations like the KKK

    • Reverend George Kee of Belzoni, first Black in Humphreys City to register, was blown away by shotgun and no charges were filed

    • Lamar Smith - activist who was gunned down on the steps of the courthouse

    • Emmet Till

    • Church burnings

• Strategy that was significant because it significantly delayed desegregation efforts and fueled further White Supremacist backlash, causing great harm to Black students and families

White Citizen’s Council

• Founded by Robert Patterson in Mississippi

• It was comprised of the “good white people of the South… bankers, lawyers, plantations owners, and small businessmen” that featured rapid growth

• Of the South’s Massive Resistance strategy, they were one of the major wings of using legal strategies in suits to harm the southern Black population

• It was significant because

  • instead of violence, it used economic punishment, political pressure, propaganda, and legal tactics to maintain segregation

  • It played a major role in the South’s Massive Resistance strategy, harming thousands of Black families, and shaping white opposition to civil rights for decades

New Right

• Ideology introduced in the late 1960s meant to broaden the conservative base of the Republican Party

• Its proponents added the politics of law and order and a meritocratic color-blind ideal to an ideology that had previously been centered on anticommunism, limited government, and racialism