Untitled Flashcards Set

PROFESSOR ROBERT COOK: On September the 18th, 1895, a relatively unknown former slave named Booker T Washington rose before a segregated audience in Atlanta, Georgia to deliver an address at the opening of that ambitious city's cotton states and international exposition. Instead of demanding political rights and the integration of public facilities, Washington spoke the language of racial accommodation.

"In all things that are purely social, we can be as separate as the fingers," he said, "yet one as the hand in all things essential to mutual progress."

By the end of the speech, the predominantly White audience was putty in his hands.

Instead of being jeered off the platform, Washington was cheered to the rafters of the auditorium.

He was now the most famous Black man in America.

In this talk, I'll explain why Booker T Washington's the so-called Atlanta Compromise speech was such a landmark in the history of the Black freedom struggle in the United States. And I'll also evaluate the significance of his career during a period when American race relations were at an especially low ebb.

Booker T Washington was born on a back country farm in Virginia in 1856, just five years before the start of the American Civil War.

His father was a free White man, his mother a Black slave.

When the war abolished slavery, he moved with his family to mountainous West Virginia, where he worked in the local coal mines and salt production works.

He gained an education at Hampton Institute, a school for former slaves founded by a White Union Army officer named Samuel Armstrong. Armstrong was a racial paternalist, who considered Blacks inferior to Whites, but believed they could be improved if they were self-disciplined and if they worked hard.

Young Booker T Washington thrived in this regimented environment.

At first, he wanted to become a lawyer, but General Armstrong persuaded him that his talents would be put to better use as an educator.

In 1881, he recommended Washington for the job of principal at a new Black teacher training school in Tuskegee, Alabama.

By the time he spoke in Atlanta 14 years later, the all-Black Tuskegee institute was quite well known as the South's leading institution of Black secondary education. Staffed by African-American teachers offering a curriculum of industrial and agricultural education, it seemed to demonstrate that racial segregation, however iniquitous, could offer Blacks a space in which they could pursue their own restricted objectives.

An ambitious man, Washington cemented his position as a race leader in the opening years of the 20th century.

He wrote a biography up from slavery in which he detailed his rise to fame on the back of his own hard work and the generous assistance of White patrons.

He also founded the National Negro Business League which signaled his conviction that Blacks must cultivate an entrepreneurial spirit if they were ever going to prosper in a rampantly capitalist society like the United States. His public activities made him so well-known that President Theodore Roosevelt invited him to dinner at the White House--

an act which prompted furious criticism from racist southern Democrats.

Booker T Washington became best known for his strategy of racial accommodation, which he outlined clearly in his 1895 Atlanta speech.

So let's take a closer look at that address.

Essentially, Washington told southern Whites what they wanted to hear.

The ex-Confederates and their kin wanted to know that Blacks were no longer a threat to them.

They had lived through their nightmare of Reconstruction in which vindictive Yankees had tried unsuccessfully, thanks to courageous southern White resistance, to impose Black domination on the defeated and impoverished Southland.

Having reestablished home rule and White supremacy, these southern Whites wanted to know that African-Americans accepted the new order of things.

Booker T Washington told them that this was indeed the case.

He disavowed political activism and he urged Blacks to focus their attention on vocational training. In other words, to learn to walk before they could run.

"Our greatest danger," he said, "is that in the great leap from slavery to freedom, we may overlook the fact that the masses of us are to live by the productions of our hands, and fail to keep in mind that we shall prosper in proportion as we learn to dignify and glorify common labor, and put brains and skill into the common occupations of life.

Shall prosper in proportion as we learn to draw the line between the superficial and the substantial, the ornamental gewgaws of life and the useful.

No race can prosper," said Washington, "till it learns that there is as much dignity and tilling a field as in writing a poem.

It is at the bottom of life we must begin and not at the top. Nor should we permit our grievances to overshadow our opportunities."

In stressing the fact that Blacks no longer posed a political threat to Whites, Booker T Washington urged Southerners to see African-Americans as a valuable economic resource, as potential partners in the ongoing project to build a more prosperous and socially cohesive South. A new South, as it was known, in the parlance of the day. Washington offered Blacks a vision of a South in which, as long as they worked hard, developed manual skills, and avoided politics, they could build their own lives and communities in an atmosphere of social peace, free from racist violence, and intimidation.

Black responses to Washington's Atlanta speech were mixed.

It received support from his friends, obviously, but also from some leading Blacks who would soon number among his most severe critics.

Most notable of these was the Harvard educated academic W.E.B. Du Bois who described the speech as a word fitly spoken.

But there was criticism too.

For example, from a Washington DC newspaper editor who called it "death to the Afro-American and elevating to the White people." And from the outspoken Black Methodist Bishop Henry McNeal Turner, who thought Booker T Washington would "have to live a long time to undo the harm he has done to our race."

This debate among the African-American community in the late 19th century has framed modern interpretations of Washington and his legacy.

So it's high time I offered a critical evaluation of Washington and racial accommodation.

It's very easy to criticize Booker T Washington. He endorsed what, even to some observers in the late 19th century, looked to be a craven strategy of acquiescing in segregation and exhorting African-Americans to accept their lot at the bottom of the social scale. Add to this, his notorious intolerance toward his political enemies and the pertinent fact that his subtle strategy of accommodation did not yield earth-shattering results, one begins then to wonder if his poor reputation in modern times, essentially that of an Uncle Tom, isn't richly deserved.

It's important, however, to note, to judge this most controversial of race leaders in historical context.

The 1890s and the early 1900s were appalling decades for Black people in the United States.

They were characterized by frequent lynchings, nearly 200 per year, and sporadic massacres of Blacks including the Wilmington, North Carolina race riot of 1898 which left scores of African-Americans dead or injured.

Had Washington been able to call on the federal government for help to resist this tide of White supremacism, his accommodationist strategy would have looked especially humiliating.

But by the late 1890s, he could not do this.

The Republican Party had abandoned serious efforts to enforce the 15th Amendment and it had done nothing to undo the damage done by the Supreme Court's decision in the case of Plessy versus Ferguson, which upheld the constitutionality of racial segregation.

None of the Republican presidents of the day were any help. Theodore Roosevelt's meeting with Washington at the White House produced no positive results and Roosevelt's successor, William Howard Taft, actually moved to reduce the role played by African-Americans in southern Republican organizations.

As well as seeing accommodation in historical context, it's vital that we grasp its positive side.

In the summer of 1905, the Reverend Thomas Dixon, author of virulently racist novels such as The Clansman, and The Leopard's Spots, published a fierce attack on Washington.

In this article, he accused the Black leader of covertly plotting to build an independent Black nation in the United States.

"Every pupil who passes through Mr. Washington's hands," wrote Dixon, "ceases forever to work under a White man. Not only so, but he goes forth trained under an evangelist to preach the doctrine of separation and independence."

In spite of Dixon's racism, there was insight here.

For the fact is that there was a Black nationalist dimension to racial accommodation, which is easily overlooked.

Aware that Whites had no desire to mix with Blacks, Washington sought to make the logic of segregation of what White South Africans would later call separate development, work to the benefit of his own race. By relying on their own latent talent and capacity for hard work, African-Americans, Washington hoped, could promote a stronger identity, build self-confidence, and create the kind of group networks essential for collective advancement.

Through the networks he set up were generally designed to enhance and perpetuate his own power, but some of them did have a practical role to play in the development of the Black race in America.

This was particularly the case with the National Negro Business League founded in Boston in 1900.

Washington with its perennial president, the league brought together Black businessmen from the country's fragile Black middle class on a regular basis.

It provided a forum for the mutual exchange of ideas about employment and marketing and helped to foster better business practices. This may not sound very exciting, but there is no denying that Washington's philosophy of education, hard work, and self-discipline appeal to large numbers of aspirational Blacks, women as well as men, in the early 20th century.

Another positive worth emphasizing about Washington is that he was no coward.

He became more outspoken about America's treatment of Blacks as time wore on.

He came out strongly against lynching, discrimination on railroads, the unequal funding of Black education, and even segregated housing legislation and trade union discrimination. These were all key issues for the nation's first real civil rights organization, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People after it was founded in 1909-1910.

The fact is, there was much overlap between feuding race leaders like Booker T Washington and W.E.B. Du Bois just as there was between allegedly polar opposite strategies such as accommodation and Black nationalism.

Washington died fittingly at Tuskegee in November 1915.

His body lay in state in the College Chapel for a day before the funeral, and the funeral itself was attended by large numbers of Whites as well as Blacks.

He left an ambiguous legacy. More assertive Blacks had already begun to take more radical steps to promote racial equality.

But his legacy was not without its positive side. Booker T Washington was right, I think, to understand that if blacks were to advance in the United States, they must do so largely through their own efforts.

This didn't mean that they couldn't accept help from progressive Whites when it suited them, no Black leader was better at soliciting hard cash from White philanthropists than Booker T Washington. The Black freedom struggle was bound to be long and hard, and Booker T Washington understood better than many that the foundations for African-American progress in the United States had to be well laid.

PROFESSOR ROBERT COOK: Like Booker T Washington, W.E.B. Du Bois was one of the towering race leaders of the 20th century. Often depicted not without justification as Washington's most important critic, Du Bois pursued a more assertive than overtly political approach to the Black freedom struggle than his rival, one that eventually led to the formation of America's oldest civil rights organization--

the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, or the NAACP.

In this talk, I'll investigate firstly areas of agreement and disagreement between these two great Black leaders. Secondly, the formation and early years of the NAACP. And thirdly, the impact of the United States involvement in the Great War on Du Bois, in particular, and African-Americans in general.

Late in the evening of September the 22nd, 1906, a large mob, perhaps 10,000 strong, rampaged through the streets of downtown Atlanta beating, and in some cases, killing every Black person they could find.

In some portions of the streets, report of The Atlanta Constitution, "the sidewalks ran red with the blood of dead and dying Negroes."

The deaths of more than 20 Blacks seemed to indicate that not much had changed since the Civil War.

More to the point, the massacre suggested to some Black leaders that Booker T Washington's strategy of racial accommodation was bankrupt.

Among those leaders was W.E.B. Du Bois, a Massachusetts-born educator of mixed race who at the time was teaching at all-Black Atlanta University.

"Behold this maimed black man," wrote Du Bois in a swipe at accommodation, "behold this maimed Black man who toiled and sweated to save a bit from the pittance paid him.

They told him, work then rise, he worked, and yet now he lieth off maimed and murdered, his wife naked to shame, his children, to poverty and evil."

Du Bois was educated in the Massachusetts public school system. Exceptionally bright and hardworking, he gained a further education at Nashville's Fisk University, an all-Black College founded during Reconstruction.

From there, he went on to Harvard University to undertake graduate work under brilliant teachers like the philosopher William James. He then won a scholarship to go to the University of Berlin where he immersed himself in the latest social scientific thought of the day and worked on his doctorate. After returning home, he gained his PhD from Harvard, a hugely impressive attainment that seemed to direct him along an academic career, a path that led him to the post at Atlanta University.

Du Bois and Booker T Washington fell out over several different matters.

But initially, they seemed to agree on fundamentals.

In fact, after reading the Atlanta Exposition Address, Du Bois had commended the wizard of Tuskegee for what he called a word fitly spoken, probably because he read Washington's speech as a call for reciprocal obligations between Whites and Blacks.

But during the late 1890s and early 1900s, the differences between the two men became more apparent. Even though Du Bois began to chafe at Washington's efforts to suppress opposition to his leadership, he initially took care not to alienate his older rival.

But in 1900, Washington retracted a promise to support him for the post of assistant superintendent of schools in the nation's capital.

Angered, Du Bois began to criticize the head of Tuskegee openly.

The essence of his criticism was that Washington's emphasis on vocational education precluded Blacks from gaining a well-rounded education.

Why this was a disaster became clear when Du Bois wrote The Souls of Black Folk in 1903. In this influential book, Du Bois developed his famous ideas about double consciousness and the dilemma of the Negro race.

"The African-American," he contended, "ever feels his two-ness--

an American, a Negro--

two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings."

To merge his double self into a better and truer self, a synthetic African-American self, Blacks must struggle to attain what Du Bois called a self-conscious manhood.

This would involve blacks in much more than just industrial training.

"Such training was important for Blacks and Whites," he said in an essay of 1903, "but I insist that the object of all true education is not to make men carpenters, it is to make carpenters men." To become men, Negroes would have to cultivate their highest faculties, draw strength from their shared history, and fight against oppression.

Make no mistake, Du Bois at this point in his career was an unashamed elitist.

"The Negro race, like all races," he insisted, "would be saved by its exceptional men," by which he meant the college-educated, talented tenth, professional men such as teachers like himself, ministers, and doctors.

The talented tenth leaders of thought and missionaries of culture among their people would have to get their hands dirty. They would have to engage actively in the struggle for Black liberation, not only by training ordinary Blacks to think, but also by getting involved in political struggle.

Du Bois put his philosophy into practice in becoming instrumental in the founding of the NAACP.

The NAACP had its origins in a meeting called by Du Bois of 29 Black men from every part of the United States except the Pacific coast.

The meeting was held on the Canadian side of Niagara Falls in 1905. The participants included some of Booker T Washington's fiercest critics, not just Du Bois, but also the Black journalist Monroe Trotter.

During the course of this historic meeting, Du Bois and Trotter drafted a declaration of principles in which they proclaim that, "we refuse to allow the impression to remain that the Negro assents in his inferiority." They pledged, therefore, to protest vigorously against oppression, ideally with the help of liberal Whites. Despite strong opposition from Booker T Washington, who regarded the meeting as the work of his enemies, the Niagara movement soon attracted the support of White progressives including Oswald Garrison Villard, grandson of the great 19th century abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison.

Although Whites played the leading role in the organization's creation, Du Bois was a central figure in the deliberations and he quickly agreed to edit the NAACP's monthly new sheet, The Crisis.

From its inception, the NAACP was a relatively conservative organization, keen to work within the US judicial system to promote civil rights for African-Americans.

Du Bois' editorials in the crisis were typically high toned, yet assertive and informative. They helped to make the journal a great success. It was the voice of the NAACP, and it was an authentically Black voice at that.

Du Bois criticized oppression wherever he saw it, not just lynchings, but also the racism of labor unions and the Republican's betrayal of the Negro.

The NAACP won few major gains in its early years, but it gained valuable national attention in 1915 when it organized a concerted protest campaign against D.W. Griffith's phenomenally popular but virulently racist movie, The Birth of a Nation, which glorified the actions of the Ku Klux Klan during Reconstruction. The association appointed a full time field organizer James Weldon Johnson in 1916, and within two years, there were 165 NAACP branches in the United States boasting over 40,000 members, almost half of them in the South.

In the spring of 1917, President Woodrow Wilson took America into the First World War.

Here was a real dilemma for African-American leaders.

Should they encourage ordinary Blacks to enlist in the hope that by demonstrating their patriotism and bravery to Whites they would be the beneficiaries?

Or should they sit it out on the basis that this was a White man's fight in which they had no reason to get involved? Du Bois chose the patriotic option, in part because of the need to keep the NAACP's wealthy White sponsors on side.

In July 1918, he advised his fellow Blacks that "while this war lasts, forget our special grievances and close our ranks shoulder to shoulder with our fellow citizens."

If Du Bois expected this patriotic strategy to result in major civil rights gains, he already had plenty of evidence in front of him to suggest that it would not work.

In contrast to the Civil War, Northern and Southern Whites were no longer at loggerheads, meaning that Blacks could no longer exploit regional tensions among the dominant race. Instead, they confronted a wall of White hatred and indifference which transcended the old boundaries between loyalty and disloyalty to the American Republic.

The ferocity of White supremacism at this time was evident in the East St. Louis massacre in July 1917.

East St. Louis had attracted large numbers of African-American migrants eager to take advantage of the expansion of industrial jobs in the city, which had occurred because of the shift in wartime production. This was a microcosm of the so-called great migration, which took 1 and 1/2 million Blacks from the rural South to the urban North before 1929.

Tensions ran high because White workers thought that migrant Blacks were being brought into the town to break the local labor unions.

Matters got worse when there was talk of the migrants spreading disease then murdering two policemen.

The ensuing mob violence was unusually ferocious even by American standards.

At least 39 Blacks were killed, their corpses dumped unceremoniously into the Mississippi River. Untold numbers of Black homes and businesses were destroyed too.

The NAACP responded to this homegrown pogrom by organizing an impressive silent parade in Manhattan.

As many as 10,000 African-American men, women, and children marched down Fifth Avenue to the sound of muffled drums.

They carried banners such as "Mr. President, why not make America safe for democracy?"

Despite atrocities like East St. Louis, roughly 200,000 African-American soldiers were sent to France to join the Allied War effort.

Most of them were given laboring jobs because the army high command didn't write their fighting abilities.

But 40,000 of them did fight, often under the direct command of the French. Many of those who did get to fight returned home emboldened but embittered by their treatment in the US Army.

As Du Bois in what amounted to a self-criticism of his closed ranks strategy, as Du Bois put it, "Blacks had come to the flat, frank realization that however high the ideals of America or however noble her tasks, her great duty as conceived by an astonishing number of able men, brave and good, as well as of other sorts of men, is to hate niggers." Returning Black veterans certainly found plenty of signs that their military service had prompted no significant change in race relations at home. The year 1919 saw over 80 lynchings and 25 urban riots in which hundreds of people, mostly African-Americans, were killed.

In rural Phillips County, Arkansas, an attempt by Black farmers to raise their income by organizing collectively against their landlords was viciously suppressed by local Whites, some of whom were armed with machine guns.

As many as 200 Blacks may have died in this incident.

In some instances, Black soldiers were stripped of their uniforms by enraged southern Whites who understood clearly the connection between US military service and enhanced demands for equal rights at home. 10 Black veterans were murdered when they got back to the United States.

Although blacks were disheartened and dismayed according to the NAACP organizer James Weldon Johnson, Blacks were not passive in the face of this furious assault.

The poet Charles MacKay, a Black socialist who is also one of the leading figures in the Harlem cultural Renaissance of the 1920s penned the following words.

"If we must die, let it not be like hogs, hunted and penned in an inglorious spot while round us bark the mad and hungry dogs, making their mock at our accursed lot.

If we must die, oh, let us nobly die so that our precious blood may not be shed in vain.

Then even the monsters we defy shall be constrained to honor us though dead. Oh, Kinsmen, we must meet the common foe.

Though far outnumbered, let us show us brave and for their thousand blows deal one death blow.

What though before us lies the open grave? Like men, we'll face the murderous cowardly pack, pressed to the war, dying but fighting back."

His call did not fall on deaf ears.

Many ordinary Blacks were ready to fight back against their oppressors after the First World War.

And this time, they had a leader who offered them a radical alternative to the accommodation of Booker T Washington and the mainstream political and judicial action of W.E.B. Du Bois. His name was Marcus Garvey.

PROFESSOR ROBERT COOK: By 1919, it was clear to the majority of African-Americans that neither racial accommodation nor a more assertive strategy of fighting for equal rights through the courts, and when possible through the ballot box, had delivered concrete gains for Black folk in the United States. African-Americans' deep sense of frustration and anger had been increased by their dismal treatment during and immediately after the First World War. Many cast around for more radical approaches to the freedom struggle, including socialism, and in the wake of the Russian Revolution, communism.

But in the rigidly segregated world of the early 1920s, far more African-Americans were attracted by nationalist responses to their oppression, responses that identified blackness as a source of pride and their own economic and cultural resources as a platform for liberation. The race leader who channeled the urge for racial chauvinism most effectively was Marcus Garvey. In this talk, I'll assess Garvey's tremendous appeal to ordinary Blacks in the United States after the Great War, investigate why he was so disliked by Du Bois and other Black leaders, and evaluate his mixed legacy for African-Americans.

Marcus Garvey himself was not an African-American but a Jamaican who first experienced the consequences of racism in the context of the British empire. After moving to London from Jamaica in 1912, he pursued a career as a journalist. He only stayed in Britain two years, but it was long enough for him to meet fellow people of color and to discover that racism was a scourge to non-Whites far beyond his native West Indies.

After returning home in 1914, he founded the Universal Negro Improvement Association, or UNIA.

He founded it as a vehicle to unite the world's colored people.

Finding only limited interest in this project in Jamaica, he took a boat to the United States in 1916, in part because he was an admirer of Booker T Washington. Even though Garvey's Black nationalism and Washington's accommodationism are often regarded as diametrically opposed, we can see here that the two men were united in their conviction that Black uplift could best be attained through black endeavor.

Garvey made his home in New York's Harlem, the largest urban concentration of African-Americans in the United States, and he set about establishing the UNIA on the North American continent. He was fortunate because his timing was spot on. African-Americans were angry at their treatment during the First World War and far from cowed by the appalling spate of racial massacres and lynchings in the late 1910s.

Garvey quickly capitalized on this mood, publicly denouncing the bloody killings of blacks in East St. Louis as "one of the bloodiest outrages against mankind."

It wasn't long before he had a large and devoted following.

Part of his appeal lay in his showmanship.

Garvey understood that ordinary Blacks led mundane difficult lives, and that to attract a mass following, he would have to develop a charismatic appeal. Although he was not a compelling speaker like Martin Luther King and Malcolm X in the 1960s, he made up for his deficiencies in this regard by dressing up like the governor of a far-flung British colony.

He appeared frequently in public wearing a military uniform, complete with medals and a plumed hat. His outspoken rhetoric, often fiercely critical of Whites, was part of his unique style. None of the thousands of African-Americans who turned up to hear him speak could have mistaken his uncompromising oratory for the accommodationism of Booker T Washington.

But Garvey was not all style and no substance.

He disseminated a compelling message intended to instill self-confidence into the beleaguered Black masses of the United States.

In an essay entitled African Fundamentalism, he urged African-Americans to see themselves as members of a proud and numerous African people, to develop a pantheon of positive Black role models, and to stop seeing Blacks as inferior to Whites. They should reject the prevailing and psychologically-damaging view that African-Americans hailing as savages from the dark continent of Africa and enslaved in the United States until the 1860s had no history worth speaking of.

Instead, Blacks should revere the struggles of great Black men like the Haitian revolutionary Toussaint Louverture.

Rather than seeing Africa as a place of shame, they should see it as a source of racial pride, as the home of a rich and ancient Black civilization on the banks of the River Nile.

Garvey also denounced craven responses to White supremacist violence.

"Whatever Whites did to Blacks," he said, "Blacks should do to them.

If others laugh at you, return the laughter to them.

If they mimic you, return the compliment with equal force. They have no more right to dishonor, disrespect, and disregard your feeling and manhood than you have in dealing with them."

Implicit here was the notion that Blacks must defend themselves if attacked by Whites.

No turn the other cheek New Testament Christianity here, but the more uncompromising message of the Old Testament--

an eye for an eye.

We can begin to see why the black masses found Garvey's message so inspiring.

He spoke not only like Booker T Washington to the reality of their position at the bottom of the American social order, but also to their impatient desire to fight back and to be treated with dignity. Many of his supporters belong to the urban North Black middle class, people attracted by Garvey's message of race pride, and his insistence that Blacks should make segregation work for themselves, not least by building sustainable and profitable business enterprises of their own in the Washingtonian tradition.

But Garvey's assertive, separatist strain of racial uplift appealed not just to the petty bourgeoisie but also to many industrial Black workers excluded from the best jobs by White labor unions. And many UNIA divisions were also founded by poverty-stricken Blacks in rural parts of the South. Often members of evangelical churches in the region, they sensed a close connection between Garvey's Afro-centrism and their own apocalyptic yearning for a new millennium that would deliver them from worldly pain and despair.

Garvey's message was heavily gendered.

Sustained White violence against Black men and women was intended to rob Black men of their claims to manhood.

He therefore spoke not only of the need for Black men to assert their masculinity, but also imbued the UNIA, especially its uniformed African legion with a distinctive paramilitary style.

Yet large numbers of Black women found Garvey's central message of racial unity and pride compelling. Some of them joined the UNIA or became Black Cross Nurses, an adjunct of the UNIA.

Others, considering him the Moses of his race, simply went along to cheer his colorful parades. As one impoverished female admirer put it, he was a God-sent man, put on earth to lead his race back to their native homeland.

But not every African-American revered Marcus Garvey.

This was especially true of the indigenous Black leadership in the United States.

W.E.B. Du Bois, for example, called him a little fat Black man. He was the most dangerous enemy of the Negro race in America and the world.

The Black socialist newspaper, The Messenger, described him as the supreme Negro Jamaican jackass, a monumental monkey, and an unquestioned fool and ignoramus.

And in 1925, launched its own Garvey must go campaign. One expects a certain amount of disagreement between the leaders of liberation movements, but the rancor evident in these comments indicates the existence of a great deal of personal animus between the contending race leaders.

So why then was Marcus Garvey such a divisive figure?

There are several answers to this question.

The first is that Garvey was regarded as an interloper by indigenous African-American leaders headquartered in the main in New York City.

To them, Garvey was a foreign Negro, a West Indian, who had no place telling African-Americans how to run their struggles. Worse than that, it soon became clear that his UNIA network posed a threat to existing organizations, most especially the NAACP.

NAACP leaders, including Du Bois, resented Garvey's efforts to set himself up as the leader of the race and to establish a rival group which showed itself capable of mobilizing large numbers of ordinary Blacks behind his personal leadership. This was in spite of the fact that there were important similarities between the approaches of Garvey and Du Bois to the Black freedom struggle, not least their common interest in fashioning a mythologized history of the race in order to promote individual and collective identity, and their determination to internationalize the Black freedom struggle.

For the socialist messenger, the dispute was as much about ideology as it was about personality. And like Black nationalism, socialism was a class-based creed which theoretically transcended identities founded upon racial identity.

Garvey's racial chauvinism threatened to cut off Black proletarians from their White brothers and impede the day when workers of the world would unite no matter what their skin color.

One other reason why many Black leaders found Garvey so abhorrent was his exuberant style, which they found ridiculous and embarrassing, unforgivably, at a time when they were trying to get Whites in authority to take them seriously.

In the end, Marcus Garvey's ambition proved to be his downfall. His Black Star steamship line was designed not only to link African-Americans with the colored folk of the Caribbean and West Africa, but also to show the world that African-Americans could compete effectively in business with Whites.

Unfortunately, what was supposed to be a profit-making demonstration of race, pride, and ability turned out to be an economic disaster.

The line was under-capitalized from the start and Garvey made the mistake of buying poor quality ships at high prices.

These ships kept running aground, forcing Garvey to suspend operations of the Black Star Line in the spring of 1922.

It was the beginning of the end. The US authorities regarded him as a troublesome Bolshevik and finally succeeded in deporting him in 1927.

His legacy was a mixed one. On the positive side, he did more than any other previous Black leader to imbue ordinary African-Americans with a sense that they were just as good as Whites, that they could compete effectively with Whites if they drew consistently on their own resources--

not just financial resources but cultural ones too, especially those growing out of their African heritage which he, to his everlasting credit, interpreted in a positive rather than a negative light.

Of all the great Black nationalists of the 19th and 20th centuries, Malcolm X included, "Marcus Garvey was the most effective in terms of the sheer numbers of people mobilized." Malcolm X's own father was one of them.

Although Garvey spent less than a decade organizing the UNIA and promoting his nationalist agenda, he left African-Americans with a viable strategy for Black progress in America--

self-confidence, grassroots mobilization, and assertive, collective effort. Lessons that would not be lost on many of his successors. The downside to Garvey was the fact that Black nationalism reduced the possibility of cooperation with progressive Whites, a point of no small significance in a country in which Whites constituted 90% of the population.

It is true that after the First World War, there wasn't much evidence that White attitudes were changing for the better. But in 1929, the Wall Street crash issued in the gravest crisis yet faced by the capitalist system on which White power in the US and beyond was founded. Here, perhaps was a chance for White and Black workers to put aside their past antagonism and work together for a more just society.

PROFESSOR ROBERT COOK: The Great Depression was the most serious domestic crisis faced by the people of the United States in the 20th century.

It hit poor, segregated African-Americans especially hard.

Yet the period has been seen by many scholars as a watershed moment in the history of the Black freedom struggle. In part because it prompted the first major federal intervention on behalf of African-Americans since Reconstruction in the shape of President Franklin D Roosevelt's New Deal.

In addition, the 1930s witnessed considerable grassroots efforts by Blacks and liberal Whites inside and outside a revitalized American labor movement. In this final talk of the series, I'll assess the validity of historian Harvard Sitkoff's judgment that the New Deal was more potent in promise than performance so far as Blacks were concerned. And the degree to which this era of reform delivered positive gains for African-Americans.

By the time of the Wall Street crash in 1929, around 1 and 1/2 million Blacks had left the South to find work in the great cities of the North and the far West. We need only to read the opening pages of novelist Richard Wright's searing novel, Native Son, to know that living conditions in the slums of Chicago's south side, another Black ghettos, were desperately poor. But in general, urban Blacks benefited from better schooling than their rural peers, as well as the enhanced wages that came from working for big companies like Ford.

Significantly, they could also vote in elections, giving them a very limited degree of influence in majority Black city districts.

Yet at the time of the Great Depression, at least 3/4 of all African-Americans still lived in the South, the majority in impoverished rural places like the Mississippi Delta, home of the blues.

Because many urban Blacks worked in unskilled jobs, they were often the first to lose their jobs in the initial shakeout, following the collapse of the US economy.

They constituted a disproportionate number of the unemployed in most major cities. One third of Los Angeles Black population, for example, was unemployed compared to the city average of around 1/5.

Black institutions like churches, women's groups, and fraternal organizations simply could not cope with the unprecedented levels of social distress any more than their White counterparts were able to do. Although his instincts were often conservative, the new President Franklin D Roosevelt, a New York Democrat, quickly realized that only the federal government had the power and the resources to cope with the Depression. His so-called New Deal encompassed a range of interventionist policies and government agencies designed to alleviate the worst effects of the collapse and sustain American capitalism in its darkest hour.

Very few New Deal initiatives were targeted specifically at Blacks, but importantly, African-Americans benefited from a range of programs aimed at providing various kinds of relief for unemployed Americans of all races.

They included the activities of the public works administration headed by a White progressive named Harold Ickes who had served as president of the Chicago NAACP.

Ickes terminated segregation in his department's restaurants and toilet facilities, and insisted that Blacks must have their fair share of contracts signed between the PWA and other parties.

Jobless Blacks were heavily dependent on PWA assistance.

In many cities, African-Americans made up a disproportionate number of those on the relief rolls. Blacks constituted 2% of Los Angeles population, but 10% of those on relief.

Roosevelt's administration provided crucial assistance to Blacks in other forms. Job creation schemes set up by the Works Progress Administration, for example, included the Negro Theater Project and the Federal Writers' Project which provided essential work for some Black creative artists, among them novelist Richard Wright. The liberal National Youth Administration found jobs for many young Blacks, while the Farm Security Administration provided low interest mortgages for a small number of African-Americans enabling them to buy land in muddled communities like Milestone in the Mississippi Delta.

The reliance of many African-Americans on government projects and relief initiatives did not signify that African-Americans had become passive dependents on the public purse. The Roosevelt administration's efforts to promote economic recovery and social stability resulted in its guarded acceptance of the principle of collective bargaining. This acceptance combined with the seriousness of the crisis to radicalize the country's industrial unions headed by the new Congress of Industrial Organizations, the CIO.

CIO unions and key sectors of the economy, such as coal and steel, quickly understood that workers' rights could only be secured with collective action across the color line.

As a result, the 1930s witnessed an explosion of bi-racial trade unionism on a remarkable scale even in parts of the South where Black and White workers hardly ever organized together.

Some of those Blacks participating in strikes and workplace protests during this period were communists, men like Alabama Sharecropper turned iron molder Hosea Hudson. During the 1930s, the Communist Party of the United States worked hard to recruit Black proletarians most notably by organizing the legal defense of the Scottsboro Boys--

nine Blacks accused of raping two White women in Alabama.

The ferment of left wing labor activism resulted in the creation of several bi-racial unions.

60% of Alabama's 23,000 United Mine Workers were Black by 1935.

And the proportion was even greater in the radical international union of mine, mill, and smelters.

Many of these Black trade union members in Alabama and other Southern states were instinctively attracted to racial causes such as anti-lynching and voting rights. Some of them joined their local branch of the NAACP helping to invigorate America's oldest civil rights organization at the grassroots.

The gains made by Black industrial workers were not replicated by their peers in the southern countryside.

Here, strike action was met by violent responses from plantation owners and police authorities.

Southern state governments determined to maintain a competitive low wage environment and to maintain the racial status quo had no intention of assisting bi-racial labor unions which they readily denounced as subversive and communistic.

In truth, rural southern Blacks were not assisted by the United States government either.

Federal codes under which business and labor operated during the 1930s did not cover workers in agriculture or domestic service. As a result, 2/3 of all Black workers, male and female, were not covered by agreements that set minimum wages and maximum hours.

Equally, seriously, the Agricultural Adjustment Agency which paid American farmers to reduce production in order to increase crop prices channeled most of its funds in the South to large planters.

The planters then used the money to buy tractors and get rid of unwanted sharecroppers. Unwittingly then, the New Deal helped force many southern Blacks off the land and into the country's overcrowded urban slums. There is then much room for cynicism about the racial liberalism of the New Deal.

FDR was happy to benefit from Black political support.

African-Americans historic shift from the Republican Party, the party of Lincoln and emancipation began in the midterm elections of 1934.

And it was clear evidence that Blacks acknowledged the limited federal assistance provided by the Democrats during the Depression.

However, the president was usually reluctant to alienate the powerful southern Democrats who headed many of the most important committees in Congress.

These were conservative hard line segregationists who not only had the power to obstruct New Deal legislation, but also use it when they sense that legislation might undermine Jim Crow. As a result, FDR refused to endorse the NAACP's campaign for a federal anti-lynching law, leaving his progressive wife, Elena, to demonstrate her support for the cause of equal rights.

To what extent then did the New Deal assist the Black freedom struggle?

In the face of things, not much had changed for African-Americans by the time the United States entered the Second World War in 1941.

Blacks remained impoverished, segregation was still in place, and in the South, most of them were still prevented from voting.

But these observations should not lead us to underestimate the importance of the social and political ferment of the 1930s. The Black freedom struggle took many creative forms during the Depression--

bi-racial labor activism, an exciting but nonetheless important litigation work by a new generation of NAACP lawyers, including the future US Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall, as well as mainstream coalition building, including the NAACP's campaign for a federal anti-lynching law.

There were few concrete gains.

The labor organizing did raise political consciousness, litigation did produce the Supreme Court's decision in Gaines versus Missouri, signaling the US government's growing readiness to demand genuinely equal facilities for Blacks in higher education.

And the anti-lynching campaign did contribute to a reduction in lynchings by the middle of the century.

Understandably concerned about the wisdom of fostering aid and cooperation from White liberals, some Blacks rejected the NAACP's strategy of coalition building.

They included none other than W.E.B. Du Bois himself, who in 1934 resigned from the NAACP, an organization he had helped to found. Du Bois is seen in the eyes of NAACP head Walter White, was to have called for a policy of voluntary segregation at a time when the NAACP was committed to undoing the consequences of Jim Crow.

But said Du Bois, the only way Blacks could really survive the economic crisis was to fall back on their own resources.

His call had merit. Take for example Carter Woodson's association for the study of Negro life and history.

Woodson was a Black historian who had founded the association to promote the study of African-American history in the United States.

In the early years of the organization, in the 1920s, he had relied on philanthropic Whites for money. But when that funding dried up, after the Wall Street crashed, he turned to the human resource of Black teachers, often Black women, to keep the association alive.

The problem with Du Bois' controversial call for voluntary segregation was, first, his use of the coercive term segregation instead of the voluntary alternative separation.

And second, the obvious fact the Black economic resources as opposed to cultural ones were extremely limited at this time.

In 1954, the NAACP's litigation and coalition building strategy finally delivered a major victory in the shape of the US Supreme Court's historic ruling against segregated public schools in the case of Brown versus the Board of Education. This judgment appeared to vindicate not only the organization's gradualist strategy, but also the conviction of Black lawyers like Charles Hamilton Houston and Lauren Miller that litigation would be most successful if it involved entire communities rather than single individuals.

This was an insight learned from their own experiences of collective action in the New Deal era, as well as the challenge presented by socialists and communists in the 1930s.

The New Deal saw no major breakthroughs for civil rights, but if we look hard enough, we can see tactics and strategies that did prove effective under different circumstances beginning to incubate. In many ways, Harvard Sitkoff is right. The New Deal was no big deal for Blacks, but we'd be making a big mistake if we wrote it off entirely.

Welcome to the first mini lecture in our course on steps in the early civil rights movement. I have become increasingly convinced in recent years that discussions like this should actually start with the Reconstruction period, that we need to understand how Black activism evolves over almost an entire century, before we get to the 1950s and the 1960s. Most scholars would place the end of Reconstruction somewhere around 1877.

One of the consequences of the collapse of Reconstruction was that the Black population in the South was largely disenfranchised. It was prevented from voting, prevented from taking part in political life for almost three generations. Being politically powerless, in turn, made Black people vulnerable to a wide range of exploitation and violence.

At the turn of the 20th century, only about 3% of the Blacks in the South were registered to vote. And that figure would remain pretty constant, pretty close to 3%, until 1940.

But in 1947, it goes up to 12%.

In 1950, it is all the way up to 20% of the Blacks in the South are registered to vote. Now, some things are going to happen in the early 50s, and that number's going to get pushed down again. But it's pretty clear that the real break with the past happens in the 1940s. It happens in the context of World War II. And while it's a story that has many factors, there are three, I think, that I want to stress as contributing to the re-emergence of Southern Blacks into political life.

World War II was a watershed moment, of course, in a great many ways. One and a half million African-Americans fought in the American military.

And they came back with considerable frustration at the fact that they had been fighting a war against Nazi racism, within a strictly segregated, and often very racist military. So they came back with heightened sense of entitlement about having access to some of the democracy that they had been fighting for. And so much of the leadership in Black communities, much of the leadership around civil rights activism, is going to come from among these veterans.

Footnote.

White veterans also came back to the South with an attitude.

Some of them began attacking some of the political machines which had controlled the South for generations in places like Memphis, and actually made those places more democratic. That's a part of the same story.

One factor is the Black Veterans coming back to the South. A second factor was the end of the all White primary in the South.

One of the most effective ways to disenfranchise Blacks had been to say, well, political parties and the Democratic Party is not a public institution. It's a private group. It's a private association. Therefore, we can restrict our membership.

Therefore, when we have a primary--

and in the South, for the first half of the 20th century, only the Democratic Party counted. So if you won that primary, you were almost certain to win the election.

So that since we're a private organization, our primaries can be all White. And we can determine who is in and out of our primaries.

Well, in 1944, after a long series of NAACP court suits, the Supreme Court decided that the game was up, that the White primary was illegal. Primaries were a public activity, and no one could be excluded from it on the basis of color.

So that decision, Smith versus Allwright, sends a signal to the South that the law, the country, in some sense, has legitimated the right of Blacks in the South to vote. So that becomes a very important factor.

The third factor is that in the 1940s, and continuing into the early 1950s, racial terrorism was on the decline.

Almost certainly, this has to do with the fact that Southern agriculture was mechanizing, like agriculture across the rest of the country. And that large Black workforce, which made Southern agriculture go, was no longer needed to the same degree. Once you had machines that could pick cotton, you didn't need human hands picking cotton. And when you didn't need human hands picking cotton, you didn't need violence to control that population.

So, across the 1940s, even beginning at the end of the 1930s, we see significant reduction in the number of lynchings.

Tuskegee Institute, which probably kept the best records on lynching, in 1952, for the first time in 70 years, they could not find a single lynching in the South.

Had you gone back 20 years, they were finding 30 to 40 lynchings a year. Had you gone back 40 years, maybe 60 to 70 lynchings per year. In the early 1950s, for the first time, they had years when there were no lynchings.

Now, of course, there's always another side to these stories, right? As lynchings went down, bombings went up.

The deaths of Black prisoners, while they were under the control of law enforcement probably went up.

But even that could be interpreted as a kind of progress, right? The fact that the most dangerous defenders of White supremacy were hiding behind bombs in the night, rather than rallying crowds, rallying lynch mobs in the open, meant that killers saw a need to be more cautious than they had been in the past.

I mean, it was a measure of progress. A grim measure, but it was still some signal that there was a shift going on in the balance of power.

Of course, there was also activism going on in the North.

The National Association for Colored People, probably at this point the longest lasting, most widely known national civil rights group, had its most rapid period of growth in the 1940s, in the context of World War II. Going from a membership of about 50,000, just prior to the war, to a membership of over 400,000 before the end of the war.

It wasn't the only vigorous organization, though. There was an entire movement led by A. Philip Randolph.

A. Philip Randolph came out of union organizing.

He was the head of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters.

And one of the things, obviously, that as a union person, he is centrally concerned with, is access to jobs. And so, the march on Washington movement was an attempt to get jobs for Black people in the burgeoning war industries, defense industries.

And the movement consisted of a series of mass meetings and marches across the country. Rallies where tens of thousands of people came, to demand that Blacks have access to jobs in the defense industry. They filled Madison Square Garden at one rally. Franklin Roosevelt eventually felt the pressure, and eventually signed an executive order, which opened up those jobs to more and more Black people.

A. Philip Randolph, by the way, was also involved right at the end of the war, in another campaign that helped to lead to the desegregation of the armed forces, immediately after World War II.

20 years after Randolph threatened the march on Washington, he was presiding over another march on Washington, the famous march on Washington in 1963.

The march at which Dr. King gave his I Have a Dream speech. But the seed, the idea for that march had been planted 20 years earlier, and Randolph is the connecting link.

At the same time, there's another kind of battle going on in the North that's important. And even though it's not often thought of in these conversations, it should be. And that was the battle against living in the ghetto, right? The ghetto, just as much as sharecropping, just as much as disenfranchisement, is an instrument of subordination.

In the 19th century in urban America, North and South, perhaps even more so in the South, Blacks and Whites in urban areas tended to live in very mixed communities. There was no tradition of strong racial concentration, such as we were going to see in the 20th century.

Over the course of the 20th century, of course, after you get the waves of late 19th century migration from Europe, you're going to have ethnic enclaves all over American cities. But they're different from the enclaves in which Blacks were forced to live. The Black ghetto is always more homogeneous, and it's much longer lived.

If you looked at 1930 Chicago, virtually every ethnic group you could think of had its neighborhood. A neighborhood that was identified with it. But in fact, with one exception, one exception other than Blacks, the people who were identified with a neighborhood were almost never the majority of the people in that neighborhood.

There were more non Italians in Little Italy in Chicago than there were Italians. The Jewish neighborhoods in Chicago never had a majority of Jews living in them. The Swedish neighborhood never had a majority of Scandinavians living in them. With Blacks, it was different. With Blacks, 82% of the population in Black neighborhoods were Black. That concentration was distinct. And nationally, decade by decade, Blacks became more concentrated in urban neighborhoods, so that between 1930 and 1970, the average level of Black spatial isolation doubled.

Nor did those numbers go down with time. They were steady over the course of the century. And so, there was a movement to push against those boundaries. Very often, it's just a matter of individuals moving into neighborhoods, into towns where Blacks had not moved before. Very often, they do that with the support of civil rights groups. But a great many of it is simply individuals making decisions on their own. Although then, when trouble starts, they often have to call on civil rights groups for one kind of support or another.

And trouble often did start. And the most significant form of trouble, the most concerning of course, was violence.

Homes were bombed. Mobs gathered on people's lawns.

They threw things into homes.

In the years immediately after the Great Migration, and immediately after World War I, in Chicago, there was a racial bombing every 20 days for three years. That gives you a sense of how intransigent the White neighborhoods were about having Blacks move into them. So that's a different kind of battle going on in the North, from the battles going on in the South.

But to mention one other Southern battle, the right to vote intersected with educational issues, right? From the end of Reconstruction on, the South systematically provided poor education to Blacks. That very often meant only three or four months of schooling a year.

And while education was underfunded for everybody in the South, it was particularly underfunded for Black people.

It's hard to come up with an average over that period of time. But a good guess is probably that expenditures on Black education were about a third of what was spent on White education.

And again, I'm saying what was spent on White education was also inadequate by national norms. And in some places, it wouldn't have been a third. It might have been--

expenditures on Black education would have been a seventh of what was being spent on White education.

The natural result of that, large numbers of people were not literate. Many states took advantage of the illiteracy that they had created through their policies, by saying that in order to register to vote, people had to interpret a section of the state constitution, to the satisfaction of the registrar.

And while that disenfranchised a great many Black people, it also disenfranchised some White people, right?

Which tended to be the case with the patterns of the forms of suppression at that time.

Obviously, there had to be some response to that. One of the most creative people leading the response was a woman named Septima Clark, who started teaching in South Carolina and the low country, not long after the first World War.

On her first job, Septima Clark was paid $35 a week.

White teachers in a school almost across the street from her were making $85 a week. Partly for that reason, she became a leader, and the fight led, in her state by the NAACP, to equalize expenditures in Black and White schools, in a number of parts of that campaign. But she eventually became an important leader in the state NAACP because of her work. I think she was vice president of the state chapter.

And at some point, the state of South Carolina decided the NAACP was a subversive organization, an anti-American organization. And was therefore illegal.

And illegal to be a member of it.

A great many- no doubt the vast majority- of Black teachers dissociated themselves from the NAACP.

Septima Clark refused to resign. And because she refused to resign from her teaching job--

because she refused to resign from the NAACP, she was fired from her teaching job in 1956.

There's an interesting pattern, in which White people see someone becoming an activist leader, and they fire that person. They take some steps against that person.

And it turns out to free up the person to become a more serious activist.

This is one of those cases. So they fire her from her school teaching job, and her next job is to become the director of programs at a place called the Highlander Center. Highlander probably started in the early 1930s.

You can think of it as a center for training activists.

Whatever you wanted to learn about social change in the South in those days, whether you were Black, White, Native American, you could go to Highlander. And they would try to teach you whatever it was you needed to learn. She was fired from her school teaching job in Charleston, becomes the director of programs at the Highlander Center, at a time when Highlander is trying to become a force in improving the literacy of African-Americans, so that they can register to vote. And she designs the program, trains recruits and trains the teachers.

She designs a program for working with people, first to teach them how to read, then to teach them how to interpret the Constitution. So picture, if you will, in the first days, buses that pick up people in the early morning in South Carolina, to take them to the fields where they're going to be working. And on the bus, there's a teacher striding up and down the rows, helping people learn their alphabet, helping them learn phonics, helping them learn the words, helping them talk about the Constitution.

And they would do that in the morning before they went to the fields. They would do it in the afternoon when they returned from the fields. They eventually bought a store.

And in the front of the store, they had a store. And in the back of the store, they had a voter registration school, and a literacy school.

And the store was used to hide what they were actually doing.

With the help of Ella Baker, about whom we'll be talking in one of the subsequent many lectures, that program, the citizenship schools, was transferred to Dr. King's organization, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference.

And with that support, it was able to grow into a South-wide program for supporting voter registration, for improving literacy, and for developing community activists. The school trained over 10,000 teachers. They had as many as 200 schools operating simultaneously in people's kitchens, in beauty parlors, and under trees in the summertime.

Graduates were expected to go into other leadership role in the movement, beyond merely teaching in the citizenship schools.

The evaluation form asked them, has the graduates been successful in getting others to vote? Attended community meetings, engaged in demonstrations, rendered more help to his or her neighbors, worked for any unselfish cause.

So my point again, which is the whole point for this part of the mini lecture, is that work which starts just after World War I becomes important in providing the human infrastructure for local struggles that are going to take place in the 1960s.

There are a lot of things I haven't talked about.

I haven't talked about the growing interest in the 1940s, among Black and White activists in this country, in Mahatma Gandhi.

And his attack on colonialism in India. And people beginning to wonder if any part of that could be adapted to America.

I haven't talked about one of the most courageous forms of activism in the South in this early period, which are the vigorous attempts to organize sharecroppers in places like Arkansas, Louisiana, and Mississippi. They were eventually stopped by violence, but the fact that they were able to get people to try to organize for better working conditions, better economic return on their labor, the fact that people were willing to try is significant by itself.

I haven't talked about the sustained anti-lynching campaigns, that probably lasted from the 1930s into the 1960s.

They were not successful, but they changed the strategic context for Southern White leaders. They had to begin thinking about whether or not the things they were doing were going to encourage the anti-lynching legislation that they so desperately wanted to stop. And I haven't talked, other than a brief reference, about the vigorous campaigns against discrimination and segregation in the military.

But a great many people were politicized by what they experienced in the process of serving in the military over the course. So, my point then, my summary, is that you can at least, a 30, perhaps a 40 year period prior to the middle of the 1950s, you can see a kind of gathering of forces at both the macro and the micro level.

Activist networks were forming, people were experimenting with tactics, gathering resources. And all those things are going to come together at some point to make the modern movement possible.