Article #4
Civil War, Reconstruction, and the
Misery That Never Should Have Been, 1861-1965
African Americans fought on both sides of the
Civil War that rocked the young republic during
1861-1865.
Those African Americans who fought on the side of the Confederacy in the
Civil War were generally forced to do so by their masters or were in such dire
economic circumstances that the proximity of an army offering food and shelter
proved tempting, even with the prospect of manumission should the Union army
prevail. African Americans fought
predominately, though, and with much greater alacrity, for the Union, fleeing
to Union ranks in those states to which the Emancipation Proclamation (1863)
applied, or seeking out one of the Northern armies to fight for the military
that seemed positioned against the institution of slavery.
African Americans in the service of Union
forces not only served as soldiers but also cooked meals, repaired railroads,
constructed new roads, rebuilt bridges, carried fresh ammunition and additional
weapons to the troops, provided medical attention as nurses and attendants, assisted
officers with routine tasks, and rendered personal service. Harriet Tubman and Susie King Taylor were two
high-profile women who served Union forces.
Tubman served as a spy, nurse, and occasional combatant; the men who fought alongside the irrepressible
and high-spirited woman held her in high esteem, affectionately dubbing her
“General” Tubman. Taylor trained under
American Red Cross founder Clara Barton and served with diligence and courage
in tending to the medical needs of soldiers;
in her spare moments she taught many fellow African Americans to read
and write, and she continued her advocacy for full rights of citizenship when
whites in the postwar South flagrantly violated both constitutional and
statutory law.
Despite his leadership of the antislavery
party, Abraham Lincoln had no intention of immediately freeing the slaves upon
taking office; rather, he envisioned a
gradual process over a number of years, giving plantation owners time to adjust
and striving to reduce sectional acrimony.
But when the leaders of the South showed themselves recalcitrant, and as
many Union leaders disobeyed presidential orders by accepting African American
soldiers into their ranks, Lincoln did not crack down. He himself had a change of heart at the
midpoint of the war, issuing the Emancipation Proclamation and formally
inviting black participation as soldiers and in other army posts. The Emancipation Proclamation freed slaves
only in those states not yet under Union control: Lincoln issued this order as part of his war
powers, pragmatically avoiding raising the ire of plantation owners in the
border states and those southern states claimed victoriously by Union
forces. Runaway slaves and military
leaders, though, filled in the gaps of this very incomplete document of
freedom, so that slaves eagerly sought out and responded to commanders all too
ready to capture the energy of African Americans who were highly motivated in
the effort to defeat the Confederacy.
The regiments of the U. S. Colored Troops
served the Union with distinction. The
54th Massachusetts Colored Infantry, the first regiment of African
American troops raised in the service of the Union, showed great courage and
skill in numerous battles. One of its
members, Sergeant William
H. Carney, was awarded the Medal of Honor for
his heroic acts during the 1863 assault on Fort Wagner, of the harbor of
Charleston, south Carolina. A mail
carrier in New Bedford, Massachusetts, for most of his postwar career, Carney
moved to Boston in 1901 to take employment as a messenger in the State
House. A flag of the 54th
Massachusetts Colored Infantry that Carney had guarded tenaciously while
wounded during the battle for Fort Wagner was enshrined in that government building where he spent every work
day. Upon Carney’s death in 1908, the
State House flag flew at half-mast and the chaplain of the state senate gave a
eulogy in his honor.
Given the distinction with which African
Americans served the Union (and in a fewer cases, the Confederacy, the racism
and discrimination that they faced in the army was particularly abhorrent. Unless necessity dictated otherwise, blacks
were given the most menial duties, and they generally worked at half-pay for
work equivalent to that done by whites.
The Confederacy treated African Americans they captured with an
inhumanity not usually evident in the way that they dealt with white Union
captives. Although exigency often led
Confederate commanders informally to conscript African Americans into their
units, only in March 1865 (a month before war’s end) did the critical need for
troops lead Confederate president Jefferson Davis officially allow the
recruitment of black soldiers.
After Lincoln issued the Emancipation
Proclamation, newly freed slaves left the plantations in droves, and many found
their ways into the Union army. In all,
178,985 African Americans fought during the Civil War. At lease 37,000 died in combat. Seventeen black soldiers received the
Congressional Medal of Honor, the highest award bestowed by the United States
government for feats of bravery.
Reconstruction
The Civil War ended in April 1865 when top
Confederate General Robert E. Lee surrendered to his counterpart on the Union
side, Ulysses S. Grant. Soon after the
end of the war, Congress passed--- and
the states ratified--- the 13th
Amendment to the United States Constitution, ending slavery; the 14th Amendment granting
citizenship rights to people of all ethnicities and regardless of “previous
condition of servitude”; and the 15th
Amendment granting the right to vote to all adult males. Congress also passed two notable pieces of
statue law: the Civil Rights Act of
1866, reinforcing the same essential citizenship rights as given in the 14th
Amendment; and the Civil Rights Act of
1875, which stated that all people should have access to public accommodations
and the right to serve on juries, with penalties for contravention of the law.
The postwar effort on the part of the United
States government to bring African Americans into the full participation of
life in the nation as citizens is known as Reconstruction. The key government agency charged with the
practical task of carrying out Reconstruction was known as the Bureau of
Refugees, Freedmen, and Abandoned Lands, which came to be called the Freedmen’s
Bureaus for short. Between 1865 and
1869, the bureau distributed about 21 packages of rations sufficient to sustain
an adult for one week; fifteen million
of these packages went to African Americans, while six million went to
displaced and hungry whites. Officials
at the bureau, led by General Oliver Otis Howard, committed two million dollars
in improving the health of freedmen, vaccinating them for smallpox,
establishing over 40 hospitals, and treating more than 500,000 cases of
illness. During its years of operation
in the south, the Freedmen’s Bureau established (either directly or in support
of local efforts) 4,239 schools employing 9,302 teachers and serving 247,333
students.
Freedmen’s Bureau officials also established
courts to intervene when local, district, and appellate courts issued decisions
suspected as prejudicial; oversaw fair
labor contracts for those emerging from conditions of unpaid labor; and distributed government-owned land in
Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Louisiana, and Mississippi to those newly freed
from servitude. But these efforts fell
short: The bureau’s court system tried
few cases after 1866, and most former slaves became wage laborers or
sharecroppers rather than landowners.
Officials also proved unable to provide a stable financial institution
capable of properly handling monetary deposits from African Americans: The Freedmen’s Savings and Trust Company
mishandled much of the money from deposits totaling $55,000,000 in 1874, the
year that the company went defunct and left many depositors penniless. Authorities eventually refunded 62% of
deposits but never located many small depositors.
In the end, the activities opf the Freedmen’s
Bureau and Freedmen’s Savings Bank symbolized those of the Reconstruction
period in general. They held great
promise, achieved some lasting good, but in the end fell far short of what was
necessary to bring African Americans into the economic, social, and political
life of the United States on an equal basis with the white population.
Although in the end offering just a
tantalizing and evanescent experience with what full citizenship could mean,
the Reconstruction era did extend to African Americans a head-spinning array of
opportunities that must have seemed a dream life away from cotton fields and
the lash of the whip. White powerholders
during the Civil War and Antebellum South were barred from holding office; especially in Alabama, Georgia, Mississippi,
and South Carolina, where the African American population was substantial and
replete with tide-turning possibilities in state elections , voters propelled a
number of black politicians into office.
South Carolina voters placed the most African
Americans in public office: At various
times, black officials occupied the positions of lieutenant governor, secretary
of state, treasurer, and speaker of the house.
African American governor P. B. S. Pinchback of Louisiana served several
months as governor after the white governor was dismissed from office.
At the national level, fourteen African
Americans held positions in the House of Representatives. Five southern states had one African American
in the House, as follows: Florida
(Josiah T. Walls, served 1871-1877), Georgia (Jefferson E. Long, 1870-1871),
Louisiana (Charles E. Nash, 1875-1877), Mississippi (John R. Lynch, 1873-1877
and 1882-1883), and North Carolina (John A. Hyman, 1875-1877). Alabama sent three African American
Representatives to the United States Congress:
Jeremiah Haralson (served 1875-1877), James T. Rapier (1873-1875), and
Benjamin S. Turner (1871-1873). But
South Carolina sent by far the most African Americans to the House of
Representatives, with six: Richard H. Cain
(served 1873-1875 and 1877-1879), Robert C. DeLarge ((1871-1873), Robert B.
Elliot (1871-1875), Joseph H. Rainey (1870-1879), Alonso J. Ranier (1873-1875),
and Robert Smalls (1875-1879 and 1881-1889);
the service of these South Carolina African Americans thus spanned the years 1870-1889.
Hiram R. Revels (served for Mississippi,
1870-1871) and Blanche K. Bruce (also served for Mississippi, 1875-1881) were
the first two African Americans to serve in the United States Senate.:
Revels hailed originally from North Carolina,
born into free status in 1822. He
studied at Quaker Seminary in Indiana and Darke County Seminary for Negroes in
Ohio prior to his ordination as minister into the African Methodist Episcopal
(AME) Church in 1845. He served as an
AME minister to congregatios in Illinois, Indiana, and Missouri and as chaplain
in the Union army, to which he had recruited numerous African American
soldiers. After the war, he moved to
Natchez, Mississippi, upon appointment as presiding elder of the city’s AME
congregation, and in 1868 began his political career as an alderman. The frist African American in the Senate,
Revels held the seat that Jefferson Davis had held prior to becoming president
of the Confederacy. He served for just
one year but during that time joined forces that defeated an amendment that
would have accommodated the advocates of segregation in Washington, D. C. In the aftermath of his aborted senatorial
career, Revels served as editor of the Southern
Christian Advocate and then served a long tenure as president of Alcorn
State University.
Bruce (1841-1898) was a born a slave In
Virginia, eventually moving with his master to Missouri and acquiring knowledge of the printing trade. He escaped from his master and fled to
Hannibal, Missouri, where he presented himself as a free man and started a
school for African Americans. In the
aftermath of the Civil War, Bruce attended Oberlin College in Ohio for two
years, then moved to Mississippi.
Settled in that state, Bruce purchased considerable land, using his
status as a wealthy planter as a springboard to an array of political
positions: county superintendent of
schools, levee board, sheriff, and tax collector. He was elected to the United States Senate as
a Republican in 1874, served his full term, and then settled in Washington, D.
C. In the national capital, he saw
service in the presidential administrations of James A. Garfield, Benjamin
Harrison, and Grover Cleveland. In 1893,
Bruce was awarded an honorary LL. D. by
Howard University, and from 1894 until his death in 1898 served on that
institution’s Board of Trustees.
Aside from these national level figures,
African Americans of the Reconstruction era held positions as sheriff, mayor,
prosecuting attorney, justice of the peace, and county superintendent of
education; most served as Republicans,
the progressive party of Lincoln. Most
African American politicians and voters would stay loyal to that party until
the Great Depression and the advent of the Franklin Roosevelt administration.
Notable in the post-Civil War social and
political context of the United States was the phenomenon of prominent,
ambitious, and energetic African Americans to move to the South. These
erstwhile northerners worked with those who
had long lived in the South to overturn laws allowing use of the whip and
branding iron to administer punishment for those accused of crimes. They also ended imprisonment for debt in many
states and in others facilitated the adoption of new constitutions featuring
provisions that abolished property qualifications and tests for voting and holding
office. Each of these constitutions
established a system of free public education for all children in the state.
Also notable in the spirit of Reconstruction
era action was congressional passage of the Morril Act (1862), which provided
funding of land grants to the governments of states taking the initiative for
opening institutions of higher learning.
A second Morril Act (Land Grant Act, 1890) required governments that
established institutions of higher learning
for their white residents to pay for the founding and maintenance of
technical and agricultural schools for African Americans. The land grant system that emerged during the
Reconstruction era laid a strong foundation for the system of publicly funded
state institutions now found in states throughout the country, especially in
those of the South and the West.
Among those black colleges and universities
founded during Reconstruction wre Knoxville College (1863), Fisk University
(1866), and LeMoyne-Owen College (1870) in Tennessee; Emerson College (1867) and Talladega College
(1867) in Alabama; Morehouse College
(1867) in Georgia; Morgan State College
(1867) in Maryland; Johnson C. Smith
College in North Carolina; Hampton
University in Virginia (1868); Dillard University (1869) in Louisiana; Tougaloo College (1869) in Mississippi; and Howard University (1867) in
Washington, D. C. The latter acquired a reputation as the
Harvard of the black institutions of higher learning, and there was a
connection between the two universities:
A number of African American graduates of Harvard went on to take
leadership and professorial roles at Howard.
Richard Greener (1844-1922) led the way as the
first African American graduate of Harvard University in 1870; upon graduation, Greener taught philosophy at
the University of South Carolina until 1877 but lost that position as
Reconstruction ended. He moved on to
Howard University, where he became dean of the law school in 1879 (the
institution had added the law school in 1872 after establishing a medical
school in 1868). Greener later served as
comptroller of the United States Treasury and in 1898 accepted the post of U.
S. consul in Vladivostok, Russia from this Far East Asian post, Greener was in
a position to help with famine relief in China in the aftermath of the Boxer
Rebellion, and endeavor for which he was decorated by the Chinese
government. Greener spent his years of
retirement, 1906-1922, in Chicago.
Both white and black educators came to the
South in the aftermath of the Civil War to open schools and train
teachers. Black schools occupied a
prominent role in African American society and culture in the late 19th
century. Not only did these institutions
provide access to education; they also
trained farmers, published newspapers, provided instruction in land
acquisition, and prepared people to vote and run for public office.
Despite the promise of the Reconstruction era,
members of the Republican Party began to lose interest in following through on
the key initiatives aimed at bringing African Americans into the civic and
social life of the nation as full participants alongside the white
majority. As that group within the
Republican Party known as the Radical Reconstructionists grew older and as
their energy waned, the Reconstruction effort languished; although, they were able to garner a good
deal of support from African Americans in national elections on the strength of
habit and residual goodwill, Republicans increasingly turned toward big business interests in the
North as their key political constituency.
Whites in the South resisted Reconstruction
from the beginning. Hatemongers
formed the Ku Klux Klan in 1866, and others of
ill-will followed with the establishment of
organizations--- such as the Knights of the Golden Circle and
the Midnight Raiders--- that
participated in similar acts of intimidation and violence: They burned churches, homes, and schools of African Americans, and they similarly
harassed and murdered those in the white community who had taken up the cause
of Reconstruction. A mob of
hatemongering whites that gathered in Colfax, Louisiana, in April 1873 murdered
105 African Americans in retaliation for election results that were not to
their liking. In Mississippi, a state
characterized by near-anarchy during 1870-1875, a group known as Higgie’s
Scouts boasted that it had murdered116 African Americans. In one of its many logically tortured and
strange decisions over a period stretching from the 1870s through the early 20th
century, the Supreme Court majority determined that the mob that had gathered
in Colfax constituted a private army over which the federal government had no
authority.
As time went on, many in the southern white
elite who had been shunted aside in the immediate aftermath of Civil War found
ways to reenter government; these
people, and most poor whites, as well, supported the Democratic Party. The Republican Party, meanwhile, continued to
live off its reputation, maintaining among African Americans goodwill created
by the efforts of President Lincoln and those Republicans who launched and
sustained the Reconstruction effort. But
as Republicans increasingly got their key donations and electoral numbers from
big business, the vital initiatives of the Reconstruction era waned.
Then, in 1877, the Republicans cut a deal that
would cause at least another century of suffering for American citizens of
African descent:
The deal, the Compromise of 1877, came about
as a result of the disputed election of 1876.
The contest was between Republican Rutherford B. Hayes and Democrat
Samuel J. Tilden. Tilden won the popular
vote but needed the electoral votes from the state of Florida in order to claim
victory in the Electoral College. The
popular vote was very close; each party
maintained that it had the majority necessary to claim victory in the Electoral
College.
But before any recount could proceed, or
independent election inspectors brought in, the Republicans and Democrats cut
their infamous deal: In exchange for
Democrats’ conceding the Florida votes and thus the election to them, the
Republicans promised that they would order the withdrawal of all federal troops
from the South. Ever since 1865, federal
troops had been instrumental in combating violent expressions of white
animosity, making sure that constitutional and statutory laws were obeyed,
ensuring that the educational and health initiatives of Reconstruction went
forward, providing protection for African Americans in their election booths
and public offices, and in many ways acting to prevent the white power
structure from
reestablishing business as usual in the
post-Civil War South. Without the
enforcement power represented by the federal troops stationed in the South, the
constitutional and civil rights laws that had held such promise for African
American citizenship would be ineffective.
But the cynical deal resulting in the
Compromise of 1877 was cut, whites returned to near-exclusive power in the
South, and an awful road was cleared for some of the darkest moments in the
history of African America.
The Misery That Never Should Have
Been, 1877-1954
The era in history extending from the
Compromise of 1877 up to the Brown v.
Board of Education, Topeka, Kansas decision of 1954 constitutes the most
shameful era in the experience of African America. Many will argue that nothing could be worse
than slavery, but I would even challenge that common view. Slavery was brutal and objectively
sinful. But the institution of slavery
had existed in many places throughout history, so that the large plantation
owners of the Americas during 1500-1865 were able to put to particularly
economically remunerative purposes, with weapons of great violence in their
hands, an institution with which both Africans and Europeans had long been
familiar. But by 1865, the great
opportunity of Reconstruction loomed;
instead of seizing fully the chance for racial justice and sectional
reconciliation, decision-makers and implementers charged with the
responsibility of bringing African Americans wholly into the civic life of the
nation did their duty with only variable effectiveness. And those making the most important decisions
in 1877 completely sold their souls to the gods of political expediency.
Thus did the misery that never should have
been ensue. Slavery was an abomination
but an accepted institution at the time of utilization in many parts of the
world. The dark nights overseen by Jim
Crow, though, were the most shameful ever spent by an American people attesting
to ideals of freedom and justice for all;
far from realizing their own best ideals, American powerholders during
the 1877-1954 era consistently and flagrantly violated their own expressed
values, very much embodied in that United States Constitution touted as the
supreme law of the land.
Jim Crow
Throughout the southern states, in the
aftermath of the withdrawal of federal troops, legislatures moved quickly to
establish the Black Codes, laws that directly contravened federal legislation
and relegated African Americans to second-class citizenship. According to these codes, blacks were
restricted in their rights to testify in court, either not allowed to do so at
all, or only given the opportunity in cases involving fellow African
Americans. The codes of South Carolina
forbade African Americans from holding jobs other than those related to farming
or involving menial tasks. These codes
also typically forbade blacks from leaving their jobs without forfeiting back
pay, which many employers retained as security against lost labor. The Black Codes in most states specified the
right of employees to whip their employees;
often the language reverted to the days of slavery, with the terms
“master” and “slave” fixed in the codes.
The codes fixed penalties for African Americans who made gestures deemed
to be insulting or speech judged to be seditious in content.
These codes clearly established different
standards for whites and blacks. The
dream of equality of opportunity envisioned by those who had worked for
Reconstruction faded. The Black Codes
included provisions for a rigidly segregated society, preventing multiracial
access to drinking fountains, hospitals, hotels, libraries, parks, playgrounds,
sidewalks, transportation systems, and institutions of learning at the
elementary, secondary, and postsecondary levels. Even prisoners were kept separate under the
codes of the Jim Crow South:
Correctional institutions and chain gangs were usually segregated
according to race.
Legislators in South Carolina passed a law
that criminalized the action of any African American who dared to look out the
same window as a fellow white worker in any of the state’s cotton mills. Florida legislators passed a law that called
for different content in “Negro” textbooks and “white” textbooks. Lawmakers in Oklahoma passed legislation
deeming that whites and blacks should use different telephone booths.
The term, “Jim Crow,” which came to refer to
the laws and practices pertinent to rigid segregation in the South during
1877-1954, is mysterious as to its origins.
The term may have been derived from a slave trader named Jim Crow, or to
a slave who escaped such a trader, or to a lame dancer known in local folklore
by such a name. One story specifies that
the term’s origin is traceable to an African American slave named Jim, whose
very dark skin pigment led boarders in his owner’s hotel in Charleston, South
Carolina, to add the additional appellation, “Crow.”
The name is also connected to a silly minstrel
show character created back in the late 1820s by the white performer Thomas
“Daddy” Rice (1808-1860); the character,
presented in black-face, was a stereotypical buffoonish slave who danced and
sang as he went about the plantation.
The story goes that Rice had heard an African American singing and
dancing a number called “Jump Jim Crow.”
One version has it that Rice witnessed a lame black man named Jim Crow
(or Crowe) perform for fellow workers at Thomas Crowe’s Livery Stable at 3rd Street in
Louisville, Kentucky. Another version
has Rice witnessing a similar performance by a youth in Cincinnati, Ohio. The dance was in any case incorporated into
Rice’s routine and other minstrel shows, with numerous variations. In time, the term came to be applied to the
legalized system of segregation that took shape in the years after
Reconstruction.
The laws that established legal segregation in
the South flowed from the imaginations of whites who similarly held a
stereotypical view of blacks; thus did
the term, “Jim Crow,” seem appropriate.
The term can be used to refer to the whole system of segregation and
discrimination that contravened federal law but which somehow the Supreme
Court--- the highest judicial body in
the United States with the authority to rule on the constitutionality of
laws--- found ways to uphold.
The most portentous of the Supreme Court
rulings came in Plessy v. Ferguson (1896).
The case was brought by African American Homer Adolph Plessy against
Louisiana Judge Ferguson, who had found Plessy guilty of an 1890 state law
requiring separate accommodations in public facilities for blacks and
whites. Plessy had been arrested for
failing, during a 60-mile ride from New Orleans to Covington, Lousiana, to move
to a different car as requested by a white passenger. The Supreme court ruled that as long as
railroad car accommodations (and, by extension, facilities of many kinds) were
“separate but equal,” the law calling for segregated facilities was consistent
with the equal protection clause of the 14th Amendment to the United
States Constitution. In the months and
years immediately following the Plessy v.
Ferguson decision, legislated their movements down the path to a fully
segregated and cruelly discriminatory South.
And the right to vote that is clear to anyone
who reads the 15th Amendment faded with the enactment of poll taxes
and literacy tests. Poll taxes were
fees placed on the right to vote, thus discriminating against most African
Americans in their general condition of poverty, and also against poor whites.
Literacy tests were designed to prevent those with limited or no ability
to read from
voting.
The prospective voter might be asked to read a section of the state
constitution. A similar
outcome was achieved in states that did allow
the illiterate voter to ask that the section be read aloud to her or him,
whereupon she or he could demonstrate understanding of the law with a proper
interpretation. The accuracy of the
interpretation was then left to the judgment of a white official, who invariably
ruled against the responses of African Americans. Sometimes questions ranged into the realm of
the ridiculous: a “wrong” answer to the
questions, “How many bubbles are in a bar of soap?,” for example, might send a
prospective African American Voter home without having to cast a vote.
Other means were used to deny African
Americans the right to vote. These
included violence or the threat thereof.
Alternatively, and in an attempt
to re-enfranchise poor whites who could not pay the poll tax or meet property
qualifications, a number of states enacted “grandfather laws.”
These laws made possible the vote for someone
who could not meet economic or property qualifications to gain suffrage only if his (only men could
vote until 1920) ancestors had voted before 1867 of some other date chosen
prior to Reconstruction; such a law
clearly made impossible the exercise of voting rights by the overwhelming
number of African Americans in the South.
A number of states used “god character tests,” necessitating that an
African American who sought to vote bring with him a white individual willing to vouch for his good character; there was little chance that a white citizen
in the Jim Crow South would do so.
Any African American who opposed Jim Crow, or
strove to organize others to do so, would face a community of white employers
and business leaders commonly resolved to deny her or him ca job, credit, or
mortgage. In many southern towns and
cities, organizations known as White Citizens’ Councils determined matters
pertinent to jobs and credit, ensuring in each case that African Americans were
limited t certain kinds of jobs and kept firmly under behavioral control.
Hate groups did terrible damage to African
Americans in communities across the South, becoming such a force of disorder
that the United States Congress felt compelled to pass two Force Acts (1870 and
1871) and the Ku Klux Klan Act (1871) that proscribed judgment and executions
outside regular legal proceedings. Even
some southern states passed laws with the expressed purpose of curtailing the
most egregious forms of violence perpetrated by hate groups. The Ku Klux Klan Act authorized the President
to use military force and to impose martial law in those areas where
terroristic groups were active. But as
of the compromise of 1877, united States troops had no regular presence in the
South, and local police and militia forces did not have the staff, money, or
time to protect the lives of African Americans;
moreover, southern law enforcement officials often either sympathized
with the sentiments and activities of hate groups, or they were too cowed by
them to take any action.
In time the organization of hate groups did
wither due to internal stresses rather than vigorous government action. But the revival of the Ku Klux Klan in the
1920s and the terrible legacy of lynchings serve as testimony to the lack of
ability and inclination n the part of federal and state governments of the
United States to protect African Americans from criminal violence.
Lynchings became part of the terrible reality
of life during the Jim Crow era:
Statistics compiled by the Tuskegee Institute show that from the first
recorded lynching in 1882 through 1968, at least 4,743 people saw their lives
end in this brutal way. During these
years, nine states recorded over 200 lynchings;
those states included Mississippi (581 lynching during 1882-1968),
Georgia (531), Texas (493), Louisiana ( 391), Alabama (347), Arkansas (284),
Florida (282), Tennessee (251), and Kentucky (205). By far, African Americans were the most
frequent targets, but the statistics reveal that in some geographical areas
whites were also lynched with considerable frequency. In Texas, 141 (28.6%0 of those lynched were
white; this was similar to the overall
national pattern, in which 1,297 (27.4%) of those lynched were white.
But in most southern states, the targets of
lynchings were overwhelmingly African Americans (over 90% in Georgia),
Mississippi, and South Carolina [97.5%], but in several northeastern and
western states where African American populations were low, whites were the
most frequent targets. In Arizona, all
31 of those lynched during 1882-1968 were white. These data indicate a disturbing tendency
toward generalized violence in American life that, when paired with
particularly virulent prejudices, fell most heavily on African Americans.
The key components of physical and economic
control that had undergirded the slave system also constituted the foundation
of the Jim Crow system. In the
countryside, where most southern African Americans lived, the economic terms of
life lay in the sharecropping system.
Sharecroppers had to pay for their cabins, clothes, food, tools, work
animals, and such items as flour, salt, and sugar. Most of these items were sold to them on
credit by the landowners to whom they owed their labor; when their crops came in, a large portion of
their profits went to pay for the items that had been purchase on credit. Landowners frequently earned high interest on
loans, and they sold goods at prices above market value. Sharecroppers fell steadily into a level of
debt from which there was no hope of extracting themselves.
But African Americans were not always passive
actors in schemes of landowners. Some
black farmers were so adroit in their labor that they could use their
productivity as leverage against an overweening landowner. In rare cases, such leverage could be used to
ratchet down rents, interest rates, and prices enough that a bit could be
saved. An ingenious and extraordinarily
diligent African American farmer might save enough to purchase land from a poor
farmer or a landowner who had fallen on hard times. This same farmer or that agriculturalist’s
descendants might invest in a wagon to haul goods, expand into other
entrepreneurial endeavors, and maneuver into position for the purchase of more
land. In this way were a few small
fortunes made, so as to expand familial wealth in the South, sponsor family
members who might want to go to college, or to realize the dreams of those who
sought a better life in the North.
A remarkable motif of African America during
the Jim Crow era is in fact the creative response to life under the most
daunting conditions:
African American Baptists in South Carolina,
Georgia, and florida organized their own association in 1866. Black Baptist churches from across the south
held a convention in Montgomery, Alabama, in 1880. Black Presbyterians also formed churches of
their own, and in 1870 African American Methodists organized the colored
Methodist Church in America. Pastors in
these churches manifested an animated style that influenced white pastors and
transferred to the purposes of secular speechmaking. African American choirs sang with great
fervor; black gospel joined a tradition
that included the work songs of the slaves, each traveling pathways of influence
that eventually produced jazz and blues.
Southern food is one of the main forms of
purely American food. Its progenitors
were African American slaves in the kitchens of the Big House and sharecropping
farmers who invented tasty dishes with the produce from their own land, game
from the hunt, and plants gathered from the woods. With artful applications of spices, herbs,
and animal fats, African American cooks produced excellent tasting and
nutritious food that became part of the great American tradition.
African American rural folk could generate
lives real substance and joy while living in the most humble cabins, under the
most stringent of economic conditions, and enveloped by the hate of the white
majority:
Stories were told on Saturday evenings around
the fire in an otherwise cold cabin in January:
Children huddled together while daddy regaled them with another
hair-raising tale of creatures lurking in the woods of Louisiana, Mississippi,
or Georgia. There as poetry in those
words, even as there was poetry in the everyday cadences of a people who
through some combination of ancestral inheritance and immediate environment
boomed out with metaphors brilliant enough to make the best classically trained
poets green with envy: hot as a depot
stove, skippin’ over the due, easy like Sunday morning.
African Americans represented the best of the
Old South. Through participation in the
church, in the creation of song and dance, in the acquisition of culinary
brilliance, in their ability to make crops grow whether the plot be the richest
in the South or the most hard-scrabble, in their artisanry with wood and iron
and needle and thread, they kept the Old South full of crops, they enabled the
trains to run, they saw children grow strong and confident and secure, and
through their sheer hard work they ensured that even a people who hated them
beyond any logical understanding would
thrive.
But having given so much of value while
receiving so much animosity in return, striving for lives of greater material
circumstance and civic sustenance, many African Americans of the South began to
search other locations for work and residence.
This search led to migrations both westward and northward, ultimately
emphasizing the latter in the great movement known as the Northern Migration.
The Great Northern Migration
Before the Great Northern Migration that began
in earnest about 1915, there had already been a trend toward movement of
African Americans out of the South. Much
of this movement was westward, onto the Great Plains, where Native Americans
typically welcomed fellow people of color with a knowledge of English; and to Texas and onward through the southwest
to California. In all of these places,
African Americans worked with horses, took jobs as agricultural laborers,
bought property, started small businesses, and gained the training necessary to
enter the professions. Hundreds of
African Americans responded to the flyers of Benjamin “Pap” Singleton, who
touted the abundance of jobs in “Sunny Kansas.” Known as “exodusters,” those responding to
the message of Singleton eventually landed not only in Kansas but also in
Missouri, Iowa, Nebraska, and Oklahoma.
In the latter, black pioneers established the famous towns of Boley and
Langston, and also those of Arkansas Colored, Bailey, Bookertee, Canadian
Colored, Ferguson, Liberty, Lincoln City, Overton, Summit, Tullahassee, and
Wild Cat.
Out on the plains, Nat Love (1854-1921) and
Bill Pickett (1860s-1932) gained fame as cowboys. Love was an expert with the rifle, the rope,
and the Spanish language. He eventually
published a memoir entitled, The Life and
Adventures of Nat Love, Better Known in Cattle Country as Deadwood Dick. Pickett was a master of many skills of the
cowboy, gaining particular fame for his superior technique in steer
wrestling. Such was his fame that in
1914 he was invited to perform for King George V and Queen Mary of
England; and in 1954 he was inducted into
the National Cowboy
Hall of Fame (Oklahoma City), the first
African American to be so honored .
Also gaining fame on the Great Plains were the
Buffalo Soldiers, the name given to the African American Ninth and Tenth United
States Army Regiments by Native Americans, who likened them to their sacred
Buffalo. Amidst numerous ironies and a
certain pathos, the Buffalo Soldiers worked skillfully to protect mostly white
settlers who wanted to establish ranches and farms on the prairies and plains
of the Midwest and West. The Buffalo
Soldiers also erected forts, escorted trains, accompanied stage coaches,
protected cowboys on cattle drive, mapped new areas for settlement, and built
new roads. They had a hand in capturing
both Billy the Kid and Geronimo, and they pursued the latter’s tough and determined
Apache people over many years.
In addition to the particular enthusiasm for
moving westward and southwestward from the South, a yearning abided among
African Americans to move northward, as they had done as individuals and in
small groups since the days of the Underground Railroad. African Americans in the rural South mostly
eked out a living from the meager returns of sharecropping. Many were not even settled enough to root
themselves in a sharecropper’s existence;
a great number of blacks roamed the countryside from farm to farm taking
temporary jobs working in the fields for as little as $60 and seldom more that $180
per year. In the cities, African
Americans hired out as carpenters, earning somewhere between $0.75 and $1.25
per hour, or as cooks earning an average $5.00 per month in 1902. African Americans also tended to work as
janitors, chauffeurs, stonemasons, and barbers.
A small but very influential black middle class did form in the urban
areas of the South by the turn of the 19th century into the 20th
century. African Americans thrived best
in fields eschewed by whites, or businesses in which whites could not or would
not serve black customers. Hence, the
fields of insurance, undertaking, banking, cosmetics, and personal grooming
attracted African American entrepreneurs, some of whom built up sizable
fortunes by seizing the thread of opportunity available to them.
Remarkably, some African Americans made
considerable fortunes against heavy odds un the economic context of the
South. In 1903, Maggie Lena Walker
became the first African American woman to found a bank; she was also initiated publishing and other
businesses. Arthur Gaston of Birmingham,
Alabama built an entrepreneurial empire that began in 1923 with burial services
and expanded into numerous enterprises, including training people in office
skills and providing a variety of financial services. Madame C. J. Walker became a millionaire via
her various beauty industry enterprises;
she committed a large portion of her wealth in various philanthropic
endeavors.
As impressive as these African American
successes in the Jim Crow South were, black southerners seeking a better life
were increasingly inclined to depart the region of their birth:
Urban life in the North beckoned to increasing
numbers of Americans of all ethnicities at the dawn of the 20th
century. The iron and steel industries
were booming, and these attracted white and black Americans, and immigrants
from the various countries of Europe.
African americans faced
heavy discrimination when they filed for union
membership, so they were left to scramble for jobs as construction workers,
doormen, and sleeping car porters, for which the competition with whites was
not so fierce. But when the black worker
did manage to land a job such as a meatpacker in one of the factories of the
North, the wage differential between southern rural and agricultural employment
and northern industrial labor could result in glowing letter sent back home,
extolling economic opportunities of the North and raising the expectations of
friends and family members who might themselves be persuaded to make the move
northward.
In the years after 1910, African Americans
moved from the rural South to the industrial North in unprecedented
numbers. Between 1915 and 1930, about
one million black people migrated from the South to the North. New efficiencies in the burgeoning industries
of the North created jobs that drew African Americans to cities that, according
to the reports of loved ones and friends who had pioneered the migration,
offered wages and a social atmosphere making possible lives of prosperity and
freedom that were clearly denied to African Americans living in the Jim Crow
South. During the second and into the
third decade of the 20th century, the industrial and service
economies of northern cities absorbed into their work forces the labor of these
African American migrants, who took
their positions alongside Italian, Irish, Russian, and Eastern European immigrants
who also flocked to the American North during these years.
For these immigrants and for African Americans
of the Great Northern Migration, New York, Pittsburgh, Philadelphia, Cleveland,
Detroit, Chicago, Kansas City, and St. Louis werer among the most popular
destinations. In 1920 in Chicago jobs as
laborers (5,300), iron and steel workers (3,201), railway porters (2,540),
waiters (2,315), porters in domestic or personal service (2,139), male servants
(1,942), building or general laborers (1,835), janitors (1,822), non-store
clerks (1,659), semiskilled
slaughter and packinghouse house workers
(1,490), and laborers, porters, and helpers in stores (1,210) proved to offer
the best chances for African Americans looking for jobs. Others worked as tailors (371), house painters
(286), carpenters (275), musicians or music teachers (254), clergy officials or
pastors (215), coopers (148), plumbers (105), and lawyers (95).
Earning higher wages than they had ever earned
before, and dwelling in an atmosphere that seemed freer and less overtly bigoted
than that of the South, African Americans at first found their northern
environs a seductive alternative to the formal restrictions of the Black Codes
and the violent hatred of the vigilantes.
But over time, African Americans dwelling in the urban North found
whites guilty of subtle and insidious forms of racism that in the course of the
20th century caused African Americans as much misery as they had
known in the frankly brutal South. The
frustration that African Americans came to feel as second-class citizens in a
region to which they had come with so much hope
became one of the most regrettable motifs in
20th century United States history;
in time, that motif and those frustrations became manifest in the lives of the African
American underclass living at the urban core, especially in the inner cities of
the North.
African Americans committed their lives to the
cause of World War I (1914-1918) and had great expectation that their service
would advance their quest for equitable treatment as citizens.
Approximately 370,000 African American
soldiers (11% of United States combat forces) and 1,400 black officers served
in the United States armed forces during World War I. Over 50% of African
American soldiers served in the all-black 92nd
and 93rd divisions. These
soldiers served with great distinction:
The all-black 369th Infantry Regiment (known as the “Harlem
Hell Fighters”) compiled the best record of any United States Army
regiment. African American soldiers of
the 370th Infantry Regiment received sixteen distinguished Service
Crosses and seventy-five Croix de Guerre medals.
African Americans , though, faced great
discrimination in the context of their military service: They were not allowed to join the marines and
could not become officers in the navy.
Even those African American officers and soldiers in the United States
Army who held college degrees were assigned menial duties or served on labor
battalions. White officers frequently
humiliated African American soldiers, bringing forth numerous letters of
complaint to Secretary of War Newton D. Baker.
The United States Army cited a shortage of housing in those segregated
times as the key reason for failing to enlist the hundreds of female African
American nurses who could have helped tend fallen soldiers. Only after 1918, upon the conclusion of the
war, did eighteen African American women officially get approval for service,
becoming the first women of their race to serve n the United States armed
forces.
And hopes that the “war to make the world safe
for democracy” (in the words of President Woodrow Wilson) might induce a higher
level of democracy for themselves were grievously disappointed:
In 1917, a racial altercation in East St.
Louis, Missouri, cost at least 40 lives.
That same year, the black 24th Infantry of the United States
Army stationed in Houston, Texas, revolted against bigoted treatment of African
American soldiers by both white army officers and hatemongers in the Houston
populace. Also in 1917, three African
Americans and three whites died in the wake of rioting in
Chester, Pennsylvania. Three whites died in late July 1918 when
racially acrimonious rioting broke out in Philadelphia. And in 1919, twenty violent race riots shook
communities throughout the country, including Chicago, Illinois; Knoxville, Tennessee; Longview, Texas; Omaha, Nebraska; and Washington, D. C.
In the context of these circumstances in the
urban North, two organizations arose to protest the conditions in which African
Americans lived, to move aggressively to ameliorate the existing situation, and
to work toward a future in which public practice in American society would be
consistent with the words and intent of the 13th, 14th,
and 15th Amendments.
One of these organizations was the National
Urban League, which in 1910 brought together a panoply of smaller
organizations, including the National League for the Protection of Colored
Women (NLPCW), the Committee for Improving the Industrial Condition of Negroes
(CIICN), and the Committee on Urban Conditions Among Negroes (CUCAN). The National Urban League conducted numerous
programs pertinent to the economic condition of African Americans, focusing at
first especially on helping migrants from the South make the transition to life
in urban North. The Urban League trained
people in the trades, taught them how to respond and present themselves in
interviews, assisted people in finding decent affordable housing, recruited
southerners when large companies advertised for large quantities of workers,
and conducted groundbreaking research on the demographic characteristics and
conditions of northern African American workers. Today the
National Urban League is headquartered in New
York City, with an Eastern regional office in the same city and Mideastern
(Akron, Ohio), Midwestern (St. Louis, Missouri), Western (Los Angeles,
California), and Southern (Atlanta, Georgia) regional offices strategically
established across the country. Today, the National Urban League has 101
affiliates in 34 states and the District of Columbia. A bureau in the latter affiliate conducts
research into problems endemic to the urban and rural poor.
The other organization established to meet the
needs of African Americans at the beginning of second decade of the 20th century
was the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People
(NAACP). The origins of the NAACP had
its origins in the Niagara Movement, which gained momentum in the aftermath of
a meeting at Niagara Falls in 1905 organized by William Edward Burghardt (W. E.
B.) DuBois. Key participants in this
meeting went on to found the National Negro Committee on 12 February 1909. The multiracial founders of this
organization, including Ida B. Wells-Barnett, W. E. B. Dubois, Henry Moscowitz,
Mary White Ovington, Oswald Garrison Villiard, and William English Walling soon changed the name to the enduring
appellation, National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. While the National Urban League focused on
issues related to employment, the NAACP gave prime attention to legal rights,
especially those related to the pursuit of education. For this purpose the, the NAACP established
the Legal Defense Fund to litigate cases in local, state, and federal courts. The NAACP published a journal, Crisis, which disseminated information
about legal issues, court cases, and topics of grave concern, such as the
continuing specter of vigilante violence and the brutal lynchings still
haunting the southern landscape.
W. E. B. DuBois and fellow giants of leadership,
Booker T. Washington and Marcus Garvey, offer contrasts in the pursuit of full
citizenship rights for African America that endured as motifs of the 20th
century:
W. E. B. Dubois (1868-1963) came of age in
Great Barrington, Massachusetts, went southward to earn a B. A. degree (1888)
at Fisk University, in Nashville, and then came back to New England to study at
Harvard. At Harvard, Dubois earned
another B. A. (1890), an M. A. (1891), and a Ph. D. (1895). Growing up in Great
Barrington and finding his academic grounding at Harvard, Dubois in both cases
operated on Massachusetts turf that was relatively hospitable to the formation
of an optimistic integrationist doctrine.
Those advocating an integrationist approach believed in the ideals of
the United States Constitution, dedicated themselves to the pursuit of justice
according to those ideals, and demanded the full exercise of citizenship in all
of its dimensions: political, economic,
and social. DuBois advocated this
position in his leadership of the NAACP and his editorship of Crisis.
Booker T. Washington (1856-1915) was born a
slave on a small plantation in Virginia.
At the end of the Civil War, he secured the friendship of benevolent
whites in his home state (especially in the General Lewis Rutherford family,
for whom he served as houseboy), learned to read and write, and trained at the
Hampton Institute in Hampton, Virginia.
At Hampton, Washington was deeply influenced by the institution’s
director, General Samuel Armstrong, who stressed the improvement of African
American lives through cleanliness, thrift, morality, character, and
proficiency in the manual trades. In
1881, Booker T. Washington was, upon the recommendation of General Armstrong,
tapped to head the Tuskegee Institute in Alabama, established with a curriculum
very similar to that at Hampton. As an
advocate of what may be called the gradualist approach, Washington counseled
African Americans to forego the pursuit of
full political and social rights and to accept segregation for the time being,
taking training as bricklayers, carpenters, machinists, plumbers, and stone
masons so as to thrive economically on the basis of terms laid down by Jim
Crow. He thus advised his fellows to
build thriving communities of black citizens capable of convincing even the
heaviest doubters and most virulently racist in white society of their
diligence and trustworthiness. The
gradualist approach articulated by Washington urged African Americans to get a
good basic education, master their trades, demonstrate solid citizenship and to
go about their lives in ways that converted whites to friendship over time, and
thus through self-help to be so successful as to undermine the assumptions of
Jim Crow and to eventually end the system of that venal creature.
Marcus Garvey (1887-1940) was born and grew up
in Jamaica, the youngest of eleven children of Sarah and Marcus Garvey. The latter was a stonemason who seemingly was
descended from the Maroons, the African slaves who escaped and successfully
defended themselves against Spaniards and the British in the 17th
century. Marcus the son took great pride
in the Maroon heritage of Marcus the
father. Faced with financial
difficulties, Garvey had to leave school at the age of fourteen, thereafter
educating himself through hard work, wide reading, and travels to Central and
South America. He trained and worked as
a printer, took an interest in journalism and for a time worked for newspapers
in Panama, and along the way became bitter over British treatment of Jamaicans
who sought work in various colonial outposts of the Caribbean. During 1912-1914, Garvey lived in London,
meeting people from the African continent for the first time, and coming under
the influence of the Epyptian nationalist, Duse Mohammad Ali. In London, Garvey wrote for the latter’s
publication, African Times and Oriental Review, reinforcing his
association with his mentor’s views. He
also gained great inspiration from the philosophy of black self-help that he
found in his initial encounter with Booker T. Washington’s Up From Slavery.
In 1914, at the age of 27, Garvey returned to
Jamaica and formed an all-black organization, the Universal Negro Improvement
Association (UNIA). Garvey moved his
residence and place of operations to New York in 1917; just two years later, thirty branches of the
UNIA could be found in locations across the United States and the islands of
the Caribbean. Garvey publicized his motto,
“Race First,” urging all people of African heritage to recognize the bond that
they shared. There was no use, he said,
in trying to appeal to the sense of justice in white people, because almost all
white people harbored racist thoughts and were incorrigible. People in the Americas of African descent
should unite, work hard to make an all-black nation within a nation
economically strong, and in time transplant the nation to Africa.
Garvey’s ideas represented a synthesis of wide
reading and thinking that he had done;
he drew from the self-help notions of Booker T. Washington and the
postulations of those such as Paul
Cuffe, Edward Wilmont Blyden, Henry Highland Garnet, and Martin Delaney who had
argued for a “Return to Africa” or black nationalism . Garvey published his ideas in the UNIA’s Negro World, and he launched numerous
programs and enterprises, including a Negro Factories Corporation and the Black
Star Line of ships for transporting people across the Atlantic who sought
return to Africa. In 1920, Garvey led
the first UNIA International Convention of the Negro Peoples of the World. A subcommittee from among the 25,000
attendees issued the Declaration of the
Rights of the Negro People of the World demanding that governments across the world address the
grievances and
respond to the quest of African American
people for lives of economic, political, and social justice. Garvey’s career ended in controversy over the
handling of investors’ money in the Black Star Line. The United States government deported him
back to Jamaica; from there Garvey
traveled to and settled in Great Britain, where he advocated his ideas from
London until the end of his days in 1940.
These, then, were the three key approaches to
attaining a life of civic dignity for people of African descent in the United
States: gradualist, integrationist, and
nationalist. Washington’s ideas over
time were absorbed by both of the other strains, which adopted some version of
the self-help approach into their advocacy.
The other two approaches came to offer disparate routes to the
achievement of African American citizenship during the 1950s,1960s, and
1970s. The integrationist approach would
be that followed the NAACP and the Civil Rights movement as led by the Martin
Luther King at the helm of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference; and also by such organizations, less
committed to nonviolence but still seeking integration into the civic life of
the United States, such as the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC)
and the Congress for Racial Equality (CORE).
The black nationalist approach would be adopted by various
organizations, including the Nation of Islam (Black Muslims), and Black
Panthers.
The Harlem Renaissance
In 1925, Howard University Professor Alain
Locke published The New Negro, a book
that captured the spirit and that great culture awakening among the African
American people that came to be known as the Harlem Renaissance. Teeming with racial pride, this collection of
poetry, essays, short stories, and art conveyed the genius of an African
America determined not just to survive but to inspirt people of all races with
an astounding surge of cultural creativity.
Locke’s book appeared in the midst of an
especially significant time for the creative
arts in African America, a period during which black musicians, poets, and
visual artists of New York City’s Harlem area gave to the United States a rich
outpouring of creative expression that would forever influence both the African
American and the general cultural life of the United States.
During the 1920s, artists of African descent
poured into Harlem, the community of Manhattan in New York City that had become
a major destination not only for southern and northern migrants within the
United States but also for immigrants from Africa and the Caribbean. As the 1920s opened, World War I had just
come to a conclusion; significant
portions of the population of the United States were tired of war, weary of old
patterns and attitudes perceived as stultifying, and ready to invest their energies
in activities that diverged from accepted norms. This was the Jazz Age, the Roaring Twenties,
and the Harlem Renaissance imbibed and contributed to the spirit of the
times. The Great Northern Migration had
begun. In the inner cities of the North,
African American enterprises, journals, newspapers, and associations
flourished. A sense of self-awareness
pervaded the black communities of America, sending many African Americans on a
quest for deeper knowledge of their history, cultural origins, and ethnic
identity. There was an effort on the one
hand to master skills needed to access the mainstream institutions of the
United States , and on the other to assert and develop what was uniquely
African American in the history of the country that black labor and talent had
done so much to build.
There was a declining interest among black
people in the United States in copying the ways of the white world, and a
growing fascination in the mores of the “Negro”; conversely, a white America that often seemed
exclusively interested in controlling, dominating, and dictating the terms of
cultural interaction in the United States demonstrated a lively interest in the
exciting works created and showcased in Harlem.
Among whites, there was a keen interest in blues, jazz, folk tales,
vernacular, and fashion evident in African America. Among blacks, there was a surging pride in
the accomplishments of their people against seemingly insurmountable odds. New Audiences and new contributors magnified
the interest in African American culture and encouraged its development in
exciting new directions.
Works of major Harlem Renaissance figures
gained publication in the publications of the National Urban League (Opportunity ) and the National
Association for the Advancement of Colored People (Crisis ). But major
mainstream publishing houses also sent forth works of African American authors
to the book stores of the United States, tapping an interest among the general
public in these innovations upon various literary forms. In the course of time multiple venues gave
literary life to bevy of African American poets: Georgia Johnson Douglass, Jean Toomer, Jessie
Faucet, Claude McKay, Langston Hughes, Countee Cullen, and many others. Novels and works of other works of prose poured
forth from the teeming brains of artists such as Rudolf Fischer, Wallace
Thurman, and Zora Neal Thurston.
Composers, musicians, and dancers such as Noble Sussie, Eubie Blake,
Florence Mills, Josephine Baker, Paul Robeson, Roland Hayes, Bill (“Bojangles”)
Robinson, Helmsley Winfield, Katherine Dunham , Harry T. Burleigh, and James
Weldon Johnson and John Rosamond Johnson pioneered with their presentation of
musical gifts to the American public.
The composition of the Johnson brothers, “Life Ev’ry Voice and Sing,” in
time became the “African American National Anthem.”
Blues artists exploded with great force onto
the American scene during the period encompassing the Harlem Renaissance; among the most seminal were Ma Rainey, Bessie
Smith, and Clara Smith. Jazz greats such
as Ferdinand (“Jelly Roll”) Morton, Joseph (“King”) Oliver, Louis (“Satchmo”)
Armstrong, Edward (“Duke”) Ellington, and Billie Holiday integrated African
American work songs and blues into this vibrant new form that sent an already great
gift from African America to people throughout the United States soaring to new
heights. Visual artists such as Henry
Ossawa Tanner, Louis Mallou Jones, Meta Vaux Warrick, William Henry Johnson,
Augusta Savage also gave creative force to art in the United States during the
early to middle decades of the 20th century.
The Great Depression of the 1930s was not
conducive to the torrid pace at which works of the Harlem Renaissance emanated
during the 1920s. But specifically
African American literature, music, dance, and the visual arts would never be
the same again. And the creativity of
those who rose to prominence during the Harlem Renaissance opened a pathway
through which other African Americans traveled with their won creations, and
inspirited all of those of any race who worked in the artistic realms where
African Americans took center stage.
No comments:
Post a Comment