Intro to African American Studies - CH 4 - pt 2

Emancipation Proclamation

A declaration of freedom for all enslaved persons in all territories at war with the U.S.

Unenforceable - due to it being declared for the states in the confederacy, a land which had already rejected U.S. jurisdiction and was at war with it to defend its decision

Second Confiscation and Militia Act

Opened the way for free and freed Africans to aid the war effort

African Americans served as what in the Civil war?

Soldiers & sailors

Guides

Scouts

Intelligence agents

Engineers

Nurses

Surgeons

Chaplains

Construction workers

Teamsters

Cooks

Carpenters

Miners

Farmers

Commandos

Recruiters

What did the end of the Civil War signal for African Americans?

-an end to enslavement which had lasted almost 250 years

- a victory won only as a result of their entry and heroic participation in the struggle

- the beginning of a new struggle to secure economic and political rights which did not automatically come with emancipation

The Problems of Reconstruction

1. Rebuilding the south's economy on the basis of free labor and its industrialization and reintegration in the national economy

2. Politically subduing and transforming the south

3. Integration of the freed Africans into the social fabric, especially in the south and protecting them from re-enslavement, exploitation and abuse

The Freedman's Bureau was established by Congress in 1865 to guide and protect the freed Africans. It was to:

1. Set up schools for them

2. Provide medical services

3. Write, supervise, and enforce their contracts

4. Manage, lease and sell them confiscated and abandoned lands

5. Resettle them

6. Provide them legal assistance and protection

Congress Passed Three Cornerstone Amendments directed toward integration of Blacks in the social fabric on the basis of equality. They were:

1. The Thirteenth Amendment - freed them

2. The Fourteenth Amendment - made them citizens

3. The Fifteenth Amendment - gave them the right to vote

1866 Civil Rights Act

Declaring Blacks citizens again

A post-Civil War federal statute prohibiting race discrimination in connection with real and personal property transactions

1870 Civil Rights Act

Expanded and strengthened the 1866 CRA

The enforcement act that allowed the president intervene with states that didn't protect blacks' right to vote, hold office, serve on juries, and receive equal protection of laws by the 15th amendment

1871 Civil Rights Act

Sought to establish equal rights in the public facilities and jury duties

Grants all citizens the right to sue in federal court if deprived of any rights/laws

1871 Enforcement Act

Outlawed white terrorist societies like the Ku Klux Klan

Sharecropping

A system used on southern farms after the Civil War in which farmers worked land owned by someone else in return for a small portion of the crops

Black Codes

Laws denying most legal rights to formerly enslaved Africans; passed by southern states following the Civil War

Two Black Labor Unions

1. The National Labor Convention of Colored Men

2. The National Negro Labor Union

Political Gains of the Reconstruction period

- 22 African Americans served in Congress

- 2 served in the Senate

- 20 served in the House

Although African American Legislators were unable to pass much legislation in Congress, at the state levels they were able to achieve much more... This was:

- Expanded suffrage

- Instituted free public education

- Improved the tax system

- Reorganized the judicial system

- Repealed imprisonment for debt laws as well as negative labor laws

The efforts to reconstruct the life of the African American and the South on the basis of freedom, justice, and equality failed for several reasons. These included:

1. The failure of the federal government to give blacks land and equipment, thus forcing them into semi-enslaved status

2. The return of southerners to status of respect represented by the repeal of the loyalty oath requirement for re-entering national political life

3. The rise of the white terrorist societies like the KKK and the Knights of the White Camelia in spite of 1870 & 1871 laws against such societies

4. The Supreme Court's eroding constitutional and legislative gains for Blacks through rulings favorable to the south

5. The disintegration of the old coalition of abolitionists, radical republicans and northern industrialists through fatigue, retirement, disenchantment and the push for social peace in the south which would allow economic growth

6. The Hayes-Tilden Compromise in 1877 which saw President Hayes grant the South federal troop withdrawal, assistance in internal improvements and better representation in Congress for its electoral votes

Plessy vs. Ferguson

The "separate but equal" doctrine that lasted until 1954 when Brown v. The Board of Education decision struck it down

The Great Migrations and Urbanization - The largest southwest movement, included _______(how many?) Blacks going to ________(where?)

The Kansas Migration in 1879

Over 7,000 Blacks

What prompted the Great Migration of the European World War I?

1. Dissatisfaction with the determination to escape the oppressive and exploitative race relations in the South

2. The depressed economic situation in the South, which included crop failures, the ravage of the boll weevil and natural disasters like the 1915 floods in Alabama and Mississippi

3. The growth of industry int he North, especially with increased semi-skilled and unskilled labor demands due to World War I.

4. The World ward had cut off immigration from Europe and with it its pool of unskilled laborers and domestic servants

5. There were intense efforts by manufacturing companies who sent recruiting agents to the south to solicit Black labor as well as Black newspapers which induced Blacks to come North for greater opportunities

"Black Belt"

The ghetto

A segregated residential area "whose inhabitants can neither scatter as individuals nor expand as a group"

Defined by its dilapidated houses, overcrowdedness, poor health, high mortality rate, police brutality and other social ills

"Red Summer"

The summer of 1919 - there were 20 incidents of white mob violence of riots, against Blacks in the North and South

Lynching

Murder by mob action, usually in the most barbaric ways

Examples of Lynching

Burning alive

Skinning

Boiling alive

Torturing to death

Murder by mutilation

Ida B. Wells-Barnett

A journalist, author and anti-lynching activist

Exposing this white terrorism and unmasking the self-serving sexual ideologies of white racists who often claimed they were lynching Black men to defend white women's honor

Ida B. Wells-Barnett's Pamphlets Against Lynching

Southern Horrors (1892)

Red Record (1895)

Mob Rule in New Orleans (1900)

Black Women's National Club Movement - Some early female societies included:

The Benevolent Daughters of Zion (1826)

The Daughters of Africa (1821)

The African Female Bond Benevolent Society of Bethel (1817)

The Female Benevolent Society of Saint Thomas (1793)

The First national Conference of Colored Women of America convened in ____(what year?) and stablished the ____________________with ________(who?) as its first president. It was a merger of two broad coalitions the ____ and the ______.

1896

National Association of Colored Women (NACW)

Mary Church Terrell

The Colored Women's League

The National Federation of African American Women

The Concerns of the NACW can be summed up in its model "Lifting as we climb" and included issues and activities around:

1. Education

2. Lynching of Black men

3. White sexual abuse and attacks on the moral character of the Black woman

4. Health care

5. Child care services and housing for orphans

6. Care for the elderly

7. Job training

8. The broad struggle for social justice and equal rights

The Niagara Movement

Formed in 1905 by W.E.B DuBois & others

Demanded the right to justice, the vote, education, the abolition of Jim Crow, equal treatment in the armed forces and enforcement of the 13th, 14th, & 15th amendments

NAACP

National Association for the Advancement of Colored People

Formed by African Americans and white liberals

DuBois was the only African american among its original executive officers

The Urban League

- Dedicated to social welfare programs

- Network of churches and clubs that set up employment agencies and relief efforts to help African Americans get settled and find work in the cities

- Controlled by white liberals

- Devoted itself to social service programs for jobs, housing, recreation facilities and health clinics, etc.

- Shunned politics and the social struggles of African Americans

Jim Crowism

The racist system based on the separate-but-equal doctrine and the political, economic and social subordination of Blacks

Social Darwinism

Advocated the right and responsibility of the assumed strong to conquer and use the assumed weak for their own more noble ends

Not only served as a justification for Blacks subjugation in the US, but also for American imperialism against other Third World peoples

Booker T. Washington

Prominent black American, born into slavery in Virginia, who believed that racism would end once blacks acquired useful labor skills and proved their economic value to society, was head of the Tuskegee Institute in 1881. His book "Up from Slavery."

Washington's thought and practice were molded and informed by 4 major factors, which taught him:

1. His experience in enslavement - the viciousness, violence and power of whites

2. His education at Hampton Institute - the need to conciliate whites in order to get necessary resources and stay operating

3. The tasks before him at Tuskegee -

4. His reading of the socio-historical setting in which he operated - brutally suggested that protest in the south was counterproductive and extremely dangerous

The Core Contestations of Washington's Philosophy were advanced in his famous Atlanta Exposition Speech in 1895:

1. He argued that vocational education was the key to Black economic success and urged Blacks to get into practical occupations such as agriculture, mechanics, commerce, domestic service and the professions

2. He advanced the concept of social separation with economic integration

3. Suggested Black accommodation to social inequality and disenfranchisement ("no race that has anything to contribute to the markets of the world, is long in any degree ostracized"

4. He asserted the essentialist of Black-white cooperation in social progress with whites as superior benefactors and Blacks as a subordinate pliant work force and the "most patient, faithful, law-abiding and un-resentful people"

5. Argued that economic progress was both a way to and substitute for equality and political rights

6. Emphasized the need for moral regeneration of Blacks, i.e. the cultivation of virtues and values which would destroy laziness, immorality and wastefulness and other vices which he felt were a legacy of enslavement

Washington in Private

Lobbied in the background against disenfranchisement and other forms of discrimination

Raised money to pay lobbyists and fight court cases against racism

National Negro Business League

founded by Booker T. Washington to advance Black economic interests

Washington's success was rooted in his mastery and manipulation of 3 major socio-political and economic tendencies

- Capitalism - his stress on vocational education, pliant industrial and agricultural workers and social peace provided capitalism with its supply of cheap, non-striking and apolitical workers

- Racism - his stress on separateness, his disinterest in political and civil rights and his promise to be loyal to whites, not compete with them, and start at the bottom, satisfied the demands of racism

- Christianity - his emphasis on the need for the Black moral regeneration and putting behind the assumed moral negatives developed in enslavement appealed to the Christian sentiment and conceptions

W.E.B. DuBois

The first African American to receive a Ph.D

Historían and Sociologist

DuBois' doctoral dissertation, The Suppression of the African Slave Trade, was the first published work in the Harvard Historical Studies

DuBois defined 3 basic kinds of historical Black Leadership and response to oppression: (& who represented each)

1. Revolt - Nat Turner & David Walker

2. Accommodation - Washington

3. Self-realization & self-development - Frederick Douglass

DuBois cited 3 basic paradoxes of Washington's program:

1. Advocacy of Black business and ownership of property and denunciation of struggles for political rights to defend them

2. Insistence on thrift and self-respect yet counseling "a silent submission to civil inferiority... bound to sap the manhood of any race..."

3. Advocacy of common schools and industrial training and disappreciation of institutions of higher learning from which teachers for his industrial and common schools came

DuBois offered his own form of confrontational and agitational leadership:

1. Argued for a "Talented Tenth"

2. Advocated a multidimensional education which would enable Blacks to grasp, confront and be effective in society and the world (abhorred vulgar careerism)

3. Advocated a cultural nationalism and pluralism, which stressed respect for Black heritage and unity yet a full and effective membership in American society

4. Insisted on confrontational activities in the struggle for social, political and economic rights and gains

5. Advocated pan-Africanism and called and presided over four of the five pre-independence Congresses from 1919 to 1945

6. Proposed cooperative economics for the community at first and later advocated socialism for the country

Talented Tenth

An intellectual and political vanguard (the top 10% of Black people) which would lead Black people to freedom and a higher level of human life

Marcus Garvey

Pan-Africanist dedicated to the liberation of Africa and building a nation-state in Africa that would demand the rights and respect of Africans everywhere

Admired Washington

Founded the Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA)

Father of modern Black Nationalism

Garvey wrote and spoke extensively on all 4 emphases of nationalism

1. Economic - advocated for economic autonomy

2. Politics - posited "Race First" as a principle of theory and practice

3. Religion - Advocated a race-specific God, criticized white Christianity's hypocrisies

4. Culture - Advocated a bold redefinition of reality in Black images and interests; i.e. the rescue and reconstruction of Black history, encouragement of Black authors, urged a socially relevant education

Race First

An Afrocentric approach to the definition, defense and development of Black interests

Ida B. Wells-Barnett

- A journalist, organizer, lecturer, teacher and activist in numerous organization

- Major contribution to Africana womanism

- Committed to self-definition, ethical grounding, male/female partnership in equality, family, community and social action

- created the first national organization of Black women; The National Association of Colored Women (NACW)

- founding member of the NAACP

Africana Womanism

- Reaches back in the US to the writings, ideas and social action of Maria Stewart, Harriet Tubman and Sojourner Truth and others

Ida B. Wells-Barnett conceived marriage and man/woman partnership in love and struggle as both...

- A model and ground of community unity and as a means of creating a conscious, committed and active nue generation to share and carry on the work of liberation

- For her, quality male/female relationships and marriage did not produce a "divided duty" but a strengthened unity of people and purpose and a shared obligation to struggle for freedom and justice for all women and men

The first African American to receive a U.S. patent was ______ for _______

Henry Blair

In 1834 registered a seed planter

In 1836 registered a corn harvester

Norbert Rillieux

Patented the revolutionary multiple-effect vacuum evaporation process for refining sugar

Lewis Latimer

- Invented the first electric lamp with a carbon filament, an inexpensive production technique or making carbon filaments for lamps, and the cotton thread filament which made electric light bulbs practical and inexpensive

- Edison is credited with inventing the bulb, though this bulb continuously burnt out quickly and it was _____'s inventions which made it last and become a useable item

- Wrote the first book on the electrical lighting system

Jan Matzeliger

revolutionized the shoe industry with his invention of the shoe lasting machine

a machine that sewed the tops to the soles

Elijah McCoy

Invented the automatic lubricator for use on locomotive engines

Garnet Morgan

- Invented a belt fastener for sewing machines, the smoke inhalator (used by fire departments & transformed into a gas mask in WWI), & the automatic traffic light

- Patented the Induction Telegraphy System which permitted communications between moving trains and between them and the stations

George Washington Carver

- A black chemist and director of agriculture at the Tuskegee Institute, where he invented many new uses for peanuts, sweet potatoes and soybeans

- Made over 300 synthetic products from the peanut, over 100 from sweet potato, over 75 from pecan

- Some of his synthetic products included adhesives, axle grease, bleach, facial cream, dyes, fuel briquettes, ink, insulting board, linoleum, metal polish mucilage paper, rubbing oils, soil conditioner, shampoo, shoe polish, shaving cream, synthetic rubber, wood stain, wood filler, buttermilk, cheese, flour, instant coffee, mayonnaise, meal, meat tenderizer, milk flakes, sugar and Worcester sauce

- as well as developing dehydrated foods

- the US army used his sweet potato flour during WWI

- never patented any of his discoveries

Through the initiative of the NAACP and the Urban League, several social activist organizations established the

Joint committee on National Recovery (JCNR) to oversee federal government policy and oppose discriminatory aspects of it

The JCNR...

Exposed unequal wage rates, lobbied for race relation advisors in major federal departments and generally fought for federal respect and defense of Black rights

The New Deal passed 2 major Acts which were of great importance to Blacks

1. The Social Security Act of 1935; guaranteed old-age and unemployment insurance for workers & provided federal monies for social welfare

2. The Wagner Labor Relations Act of 1935; guaranteed the right of collective bargaining and outlawed company unions

The "Black Cabinet" or the "Black Brain Trust"

- called this due to their academic and professional achievements

- Group of African Americans FDR appointed to key government positions; served as unofficial advisors to the president

Most Notable members of the "Black Cabinet"

1. Robert Weaver; an economist, served in the Department of Interior and several federal agencies

2. Mary McLeod Bethune; founder-president of Bethune-Cookman College, National Youth Administration

3. Eugene Jones; Executive secretary of the Urban League, Department of Commerce

4. Ralph Bunche; Department of State

5. Rayford Logan; Coordinator of Inter-American Affairs

6. Abram Harris; economist, National Recovery Administration

These positions were not cabinet level, though they were a breakthrough in appointment by merit and paved the way for advances in the 60s and afterwards

African Americans reaffirmation of their commitment to social justice in the 60s had two main tendencies:

1. Integrationist; which in reaching its height and through its loss of initiative laid the historical groundwork for the resurgence of

2. Nationalist

The Integrationist Thrust, in its political sense, was an effort to

Break down barriers to full participation in US society and remove the penalties and other negative consequences of racial distinctions

The Civil Rights struggle was lead by major groups such as

SNCC - Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee

CORE - Congress of Racial Equality

SCLC - Southern Christian Leadership Conference

NAACP - National Association for the Advancement of Colored People

Urban League

NCNW - National Council of Negro Women

Civil Rights Struggle Major Personalities:

Fannie Lou Hamer

Bob Moses

Ella Baker

Dorothy Height

Martin Luther King Jr

Ruby Doris Robinson

Kramer Ture (Stokely Carmichael

The turning point in the Black Civil Rights struggle is usually considered to be

The winning by the NAACP of the 1954 Supreme Court Decision, Brown v. The Board of Education

Montgomery Bus Boycott

In 1955, after Rosa Parks was arrested for refusing to give up her seat on a city bus, Dr. Martin Luther King led a boycott of city busses. After 11 months the Supreme Court ruled that segregation of public transportation was illegal

This marked the beginning of the sit-in movement and a sustained period of Black activism and societal confrontation that would last a decade, only declining with police suppression in the late 60s and defection int he early 70s:

February 1, 1960

Four students from North Carolina Agricultural and Technical College in Greensboro, N.C., decided to protest and challenge the segregation of public facilities by sitting down at a lunch counter in a variety store and ordering coffee

The Freedom Rides

1961 event organized by CORE and SNCC in which an interracial group of civil rights activists tested southern states' compliance to the Supreme Court ban of segregation on interstate buses

- forced the Attorney General to dispatch a force of 600 marshals and other federal officers to intervene in a Freedom Ride confrontation in Montgomery

In 1963, the centennial year of the Emancipation Proclamation, Black people launched a series of massive demonstrations to expose the contradictions in US society and demanded social change: (one of the most notable & the largest most dramatic march)

1. One of the most notable: Birmingham Demonstration of April 3 1963; Under the leadership of MLK and the SCLC

2. The March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom August 28, 1963

The most effective and largest contributor of freedom fighters to the struggle

SNCC

Through legal, economic and political challenges, Blacks were able to achieve among other things (60s):

1. The 1954 Brown Decision

2. The Civil Rights Act of 1957

3. The 1960 Civil Rights Bill

4. The Interstate Commerce Commission ruling September, 1961, against racial segregation on interstate carriers and terminals

5. The Civil Rights Act of 1964 which was the most far-reaching and comprehensive civil rights law passed by Congress

6. Mass voter registration

7. The 1965 Voting Rights Act

8. Widespread desegregation of public facilities

The Civil Rights Movement (5 consequences):

1. Increased liberalization of the US system

2. Severely exposed the contradictions of the American dream in both the eyes of US society and the world

3. The Movement mobilized and politically educated people who before were, in fact, outside the political process

4. Laid the organization and political-educational basis for continued struggle in other areas

5. By its uncompleted tasks, the non-attainment of its core social objectives, the timidity of its methods and its eventual historical exhaustion, laid the historical basis for the rise of its nationalist alternative

The beginning of the Black Power Movement is marked by

The Watts Revolt in 1965

Addressing the issue of the struggle for Black Power, Maulana Karenga asserted that it was a struggle to achieve three fundamental things:

1. Self-determination

2. Self-respect

3. Self-defense

Operational Unity

unity in diversity and unity without uniformity

As an expression of Nationalism, the Black Power Movement can be divided into 4 basic tendencies or thrusts:

1. The religious thrust

2. The cultural thrust

3. The political thrust

4. The economic thrust (had no main organizational thrust, but was a general view that argued for economic Black control of the Black community and ranged from Ujamaa, socialist and cooperative economics to Black capitalism in various forms

The Black Power Movement; The Religious Thrust

- Was both Islamic and Christian

- the Islamic section was personified by the Nation of Islam (NOI) under the leadership of the Honorable Elijah Muhammad

- the Christian nationalist focus was best personified by Bishop Jaramogi Abebe Agyeman (Rev. Albert Cleage) the founder of the Shrine of the Black Madonna

The Honorable Elijah Muhammad

1. Posed Islam as a necessary alternative to christianity (Saw christianity as the oppressor's religion)

2. Argued that Blacks were the chosen people of God and that god was Black and the devil was white

3. Contended that separation of Blacks was a divine imperative

4. Argued for economic self-help and national racial solidarity in a Black United Front

5. Stressed the need for racial and Islamic solidarity throughout the world

The Nation of Islam reached its height in the early 60s. Muhammad's achievements, as leader of the NOI, lie in both the area of theory and practice...

1. He broke the monopoly whites had on good and God by revealing an alternative truth and reconstructing reality in Black images and interests

2. Broke the traditional monopoly Arabs and other Asian Muslims had on the doctrinal interpretation of Islam in the US

3. He established a socio-historically specific form of Islam for Blacks

4. Along with his main spokesperson at the time, Malcolm X, challenged Black Christianity to redefine itself and reaffirm its relevance

5. Through this theological achievement and the building of its practical, organizational and institutional complement, the NOI, he placed himself in the ranks of the most significant Black men in the history of the African American people

The Black Power Movement; The Religious Thrust; Bishop Jaramogi Abebe Agyeman (Rev. Albert Cleage) the founder of the Shrine of the Black Madonna argued

God is Black and partisan and demands social struggle, not submission

Believed Black people were God's chosen people

The Black Power Movement; The Cultural Thrust; US

- Meaning "us", "African People"

- Founded by Karenga in 1965

- is a social and cultural change organization

Us' conception of culture is that...

It is a total way of life and therefore when its members talk about cultural nationalism, it is about insuring and building an African-centered foundation in every area of life, especially in seven areas of culture

The 7 Areas of Culture:

1. History

2. Religion

3. Social Organization

4. Economic Organization

5. Political Organization

6. Creative Production

7. Ethos (psychology)

Us defined itself as

Cultural nationalist in grounding and focus and revolutionary in thought and practice

Malcolm X argued

1. That blacks needed a moral and spiritual regeneration and that it was best achieved through Islam

2. Stressed the need for a Black United Front and built the organization of African American Unity modeled after the Organization of African Unity on the continent

3. Taught the need for pan-Africanist and Third World solidarity

4. Blacks needed to redefine the Black struggle from one of civil rights to human rights; in order that the international community (UN) could intervene

The Deacons for Defense in Louisiana

Protected civil rights workers in the South and served as inspiration to urban nationalist groups in the north

Black Panther Party for Self-Defense founded by ______&_____(who?). in what areas?

Huey Newton & Bobby Seale

Oakland & Chicago

Black Panther Party started as & transformed into

1. Founded as the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense; a nationalist community defense structure

2. Dropped the "for self-defense"; transformed into a Marxist-integrationist structure & began to work with Whites in political and community service programs

Black Panther Party Programs included:

Providing free breakfasts

Health care

Drug education

Black Panther Party advocated for ________among other things

Full employment

Decent housing

Freedom for Black men in prisons and jails

The end to police brutality

The Republic of New Africa (RNA) under the leadership of __________(who?):

Imari Obadele

Obadele argued that ____________ and were due a referendum to choose among 3 options:

- Blacks were not citizens of the US

1. US citizenship

2. Nationalism in Africa or a country of choice

3. Building of a nation on this soil

What did Obadele do? What did he demand?

1. Chose the land

2. Declared independence from the US

3. Demanded 5 southern states (south carolina, Georgia, Alabama, Louisiana, & Mississippi) to construct a Republic of New Africa

4. Demanded reparations from the US to build the nation

The nationalist thrust contributed greatly to the character, course and achievement of the 60s. It included:

1. The building of economic institutions mainly through the NOI

2. Alternative educational institutional constructions

3. The building of Black Student Unions and a Black Student Movement

4. The construction of Black Studies Programs

5. The necessary delinking with the African people on the continent and int he Diaspora

6. The exploration of armed struggle and self-defense as a right and responsibility

7. The redefinition of the world in Black images and interests

8. Laying of the foundations for benefits enjoyed in the 70s

COINTELPRO (who?) (what?)

- Or counterintelligence program launched by the FBI in 1968

- J. Edgar Hoover, director of the FBI, asked 41 field officers for hard-hitting ideas to disrupt, discredit and destroy all real and potentially threatening Black leadership

COINTELPRO targeted groups & people included:

Nation of Islam

Black Panthers

Us (especially the leadership & the Simba Wachanga, the Young Lions)

CORE

SNCC

RAM

Martin Luther King

COINTELPRO (what did they do?)

- Activists were shot & murdered, put in captivity on trumped-up charges or driven into exile and underground, and families as well as organizations disrupted and destroyed

- Using agent-provocateurs, Hoover penetrated organizations, provoked them into internal struggles and violence and adventuristic acts which led to their arrests and deaths

- Cautioned the media never to advertise Black activists, especially nationalists, except to discredit them, Hoover created and fed disinformation to them