Article #5 in a Series >>>>> Subject Area Reference Documents for Teachers and Students in the Minneapolis Public Schools >>>>> African American History

I.  African Origins

 

Africans:  Ancestors to All Humankind

             

The ancestors of all human beings were from Africa.

 

About 4 million years ago, the hominid Australopithecus dwelt in East Africa;  this creature had a much smaller brain than would be the case for homo sapiens (modern human), but its body featured many characteristics of the human.  Around 2.5 million years ago, the hominid homo habilis appeared alongside Australopithecus and put its larger brain to work fashioning tools of rock and wood.

Approximately 1.5 million years ago, the hominid homo erectus walked upright and put its still larger brain to work to produce fire for cooking food and generating warmth.  Homo erectus was the first hominid emigrant population, heading generally on a northeastwardly trek, into Southeast, South, Central, and East Asia.

 

Approximately 200,000 years ago the modern human, homo sapiens, with three-pound brain and the full physical and mental characteristics of humanity, appeared in places just a bit northward in the same general region of East Africa as homo erectus.   Homo sapiens became the second emigrant population to make its way out of Africa but followed a different trek than that of homo erectus, heading most notably to what we today know as Europe, encountering the creature homo neanderthalensis (Neanderthal human).  The Neanderthals coexisted with homo sapiens but by about 75,000 years ago had been variously absorbed or competitively overwhelmed by these true humans.  Human beings then spread out with remarkable swiftness over the globe:  Eurasia by about 150,000 B.C., Australia by 100,000 B.C. (BCE), the Bering Strait into the Americas by about 12,000 B.C. (BCE).

 

So by 12,000 B. C. (BCE), descendants of common African ancestors covered the globe.  The people who populated the globe developed many distinct cultures and many varieties of tools, diets, social arrangements, and early religious expression as they adapted to particular geographic settings and climatic demands.  Skin pigmentation developed in evolutionary fashion, according to the processes of natural selection, producing a range between the very light-skinned northern Europeans and dark-skinned Africans.

 

People on the continent of Africa were among the first to make tools.  They were the first to make bone tools, and they were among those producing tools in five main traditions:  Oldowan (simple chopping and flake tools), biface (hand axes chipped on both sides for cutting), flake (small cutting and flaking tools), single-stone blade (many usable blades from a single stone), and microlith (small tools used as projectile points and for carving softer materials).  Around 800,000 years ago fishers living in the basin of the Congo River invented sophisticated tackle to catch giant catfish.

 

In Africa, as elsewhere, people came to discover that implantation of certain seeds can produce a predictable crop, yielding the possibility of settled village life.  When this happened, humanity moved from the Paleolithic (Old Stone Age) phase into the Neolithic (New Stone Age) phase.  People in Egypt were among the first to cultivate crops, doing so along the majestic Nile River.  Neolithic societies arose in sub-Saharan Africa during 6,000-3,000 B. C. (BCE), about the same time that agricultural societies were also developing in Europe.  

 

Classical Egypt

 

About 3100 B.C. (BCE), King Menes of Upper (southern) Egypt superintended victory over a competing kingdom in Lower (northern) Egypt, setting up a capital at Memphis, just south of the fertile Nile Delta region.  King Menes and his successors during an early stage lasting until about 2700 B. C. (BCE) were considered divine, the living embodiment of the falcon-god Horus.  Farmers tilling the rich soil along the Nile River irrigated their fields and used some of the world’s first plows.

 

During the period of 2686-2181 B. C. (BCE) known as the Old Kingdom, Egyptians constructed the pyramids.  Among the most notable of these were the first product of this kind of construction, the Step Pyramid in Memphis in honor of the pharaoh Zoser, designed by his vizier (prime minister), Imhotep;  and the multi-chamber Great Pyramid at Gaza, highly advanced in technique and intricacy, overseen by the pharaoh Khufu.

 

Internal rivalries and invasion by Asiatic tribesmen from the Sinai caused chaos, decline, and the eventual fading of the Old Kingdom into the First Intermediate Period (2181-2050 B. C. [BCE]).  The pharaoh Montuhotep II inaugurated a new dynasty that began the period of c. 2050-1786 known as the Middle Kingdom.   Montuhotep II and successors such as Amenemhat I and those in the familial line Senruset I, II, and III superintended military campaigns southward to Nubia and northeastward to Palestine and Syria.   Motivation for the pharaohs’ sponsorship of these campaigns focused on certain raw materials for which the Egyptians had more need than supply:   ivory, gold, and other precious metals in Nubia;  timber and precious stones and metals in Palestine and Syria. 

 

The period of the Middle Kingdom featured vigorous activity of many sorts:  A large-scale reclamation and irrigation project in the area of Fayum increased Egypt’s supply of food;  the development of the cuneiform writing system increase the efficiency of scribes in recording governmental decrees, religious events, and commercial transactions.  The creations of Egyptian statuary and jewelry conveyed a sense of the wide geographical universe inhabited by the Egyptians, whose artists and artisans used numerous materials of foreign origin.

 

By 1786, processes pf late dynastic decline set in, and Egyptian history entered the Second Intermediate Period, for the last half of which (1674-1570  B.C. [BCE]) the technologically advanced Hyksos people stormed across Central and West Asia to enter Egypt, utilizing their chariots and iron weapons to subdue the local Egyptian population.   They constructed a new capital named Avaris and for the most part satisfied themselves with rule of Lower (northern) Egypt, probably commanding tribute from but not exerting direct control over Thebes and other southern areas traditionally under the rule of the pharaohs. 

 

In 1570 B. C. (BCE), the locally powerful Theban ruler, Kamose, worked with his brother (Ahmose) to conquer Avaris, expel the Hyksos from Egypt, and inaugurate the first dynasty of the New Kingdom (c 1570-1085 B. C. [BCE]).  During the rule of the New Kingdom pharaohs, Egypt reasserted itself as one of the major powers of the ancient African and Mediterranean world, stretching territorially from the Sudan to Syria, and edging close to the Nubians of the Horn of Africa, conquering them for a time and gaining direct access to their gold mines   Religious focus was directed toward Amun-Re (Amon-Ra), conjoining the chief Theban deity Amun (Amon) with the sun god Re (Ra) long worshiped throughout the land of the pharaohs. 

 

Notable pharaohs of Egypt during the period of the New Kingdom included Hatshepsut (r. circa 1417-1379 B. C. (BCE), one of several female pharaohs who took power during a stretch of time when the line of male heirs ran thin;  Akhenaton (Ikhnaton, 1370-1362 B. C. [BCE]), a dynamic ruler who attempted to redirect worship toward Aton, the sun’s disk, and constructed a new city named after himself (on the site of the modern Tel el Amarna);  and Ramesses (Ramses) I, II, and III---  who during the decades after1320 (when Ramses I took power) expanded to areas, such as Palestine and Nubia, typically held when the power of the Egyptian pharaohs was greatest.

 

The last pharaohs of the New Kingdom were not as successful as had been earlier occupants of the throne in contending with Hittites to the east, Libyans to the west, piratical “sea peoples” to the north, and Nubians to the south.  The New Kingdom fell under pressure from such outsiders, and from internal divisions, in 1085 B. C. (BCE).  During much of the 9^th and 8^th centuries B. C. (BCE), Libyans controlled Egypt, at first in the dynastic style of the pharaohs and then as an array of city-states.  The Nubians controlled Egypt for several decades after 712 B. C. (BCE) and the Assyrians asserted dominance for a while before the pharaoh Psamtik I (r. 664-610 B. C. [BCE]) established a line of native Egyptian rulers.  Then, weakened by military confrontations with the Babylonians, the Egyptians submitted to conquest by the Persians, who controlled Egypt for most of the years from 525 until 323 B. C. (BCE).

 

In 323 B. C. (BCE), the forces of Alexander the Great smashed their way into Egypt to establish  the magnificent city of Alexandria and reorient Egyptian civilization towards that rich blend of Greek, Roman, and Arab influences known as Hellenistic civilization.  Then, some ten centuries later (7^th century A. D. [CE]), another great invading force---  that of the Muslims---  reoriented Egyptian civilization once again, the Muslims were hugely important  for their intellectual prowess in incorporating the scholarly, literary,  and artistic works of Graeco-Roman civilization into a cultural realm that was dominated religiously by Islam.

 

Kush, Meroe, and Axum

 

Under pressure from the Assyrians, the Nubian pharaoh Taharqa retreated southward in the 7th century B. C. (BCE) to Kush, where the Nubians (Kushites) mastered the iron-making skills learned from the Assyrians and built a stable and prosperous kingdom focused at the Fourth Cataract, in the great “S” bend of the Nile, and eastward into the regions that we today know as Ethiopia and Somalia.  This land at the time was very fertile and able to support large herds of cattle;  by the 6^th century B. C. (BCE), the borders of Kush stretched to the south of present-day Khartoum.

 

As years of grazing depleted the soil, the people of Kush trended toward Meroe, south of the Atbara River’s confluence with the Nile.  The great state of Meroe had abundant resources in iron ore and the wood necessary to smelt it;  heaps of slag that to this day appear across this land bear witness to the thriving iron industry of Meroe.  Protected by a well-armed cavalry, traders of Meroe exchanged goods with counterparts in Egypt, Arabia, and India.  The empire’s artists and artisans blended influences from Egypt, the Hellenistic world, and India to produce works stunning in their adaptation of these diverse styles to themes appropriate to the geographical setting of Meroe.

 

Desiccation of the land induced a decline in the wealth and military might of Meroe, which left the land vulnerable to an attack from nearby Axum in 350 A. D. (CE).  Here the mostly black Africans of

Meroe blended with a population that had in the 7^th century B. C. (BCE) migrated from today’s Yemen across the Red Sea to the Horn of Africa.  The Axumite court was stage for ethnically diverse representatives from West Asian and the Mediterranean, bringing Hellenistic, Greek Orthodox, Arabian, Persian, and Indian influences.  The Muslim conquest of the Arabian peninsula and then Egypt disrupted the sea trade on which much of Axum’s power and prosperity had depended, precipitating a decline.  But from time to time the Axumite society reasserted the cultural greatness of the days of glory, and particularly during the medieval era underwent a renaissance.  The modern urban center of Axum is the holy city of the Coptic Christians.    

 

Great West African Empires

 

In the 8^th century there arose in West Africa the first of three great empires that would for many centuries dominate the Sudan, the region south of the Sahara Desert and north of the tropical forests running from Senegal in the west to the Nile valley in the east.  This first of the three great West African empires was Ghana, which initially consolidated power among their own people, the Soninke, then asserting power over a strong and dynamic trading state stretching between the Senegal and Upper Niger Rivers.  Ghanaian traders bartered for gold with traders who lived intermediately between themselves and the gold miners who lived and labored to the far south.  The Ghanaians then sold the gold to merchants who crossed the desert and gathered in the southernmost oases at the northern edge of the Sudan and served as terminal points for caravans that gained fame for their journeys across the Sahara.

 

During 1076-1077 A. D. (CE) the Almoravids (a fierce Berber nomad configuration that typically guided trade caravans across the desert) broke out of the western Sahara desert to lead a holy war northward through Morocco and all the way to Spain (where they conquered the Umayyad Moors);  and southward to lands that included the Ghanaian empire.  Several smaller kingdoms survived the Almoravid invasion, among which was the well-organized petty kingdom of Mal.  Under the rule of three dynamic rulers---  Sundiata, Mansa Uli, and Mansa Musa---   Mali expanded in the course of 1220-1340 A. D. (CE)  to occupy an area in West Africa larger than had Ghana.  Ghana covered much of the western Sudan and featured one of the world’s most opulent and cultured cities, Timbuktu.   Sundiata, Mansa Ul, and Mansa Musa embraced Islam, which had become such a powerful cultural force throughout West Asia, North Africa, parts of Southeast Asia, and into stretches of West and Central Africa.  In 1324, Mansa Musa made a pilgrimage to Mecca, carrying with him and spending so much gold in route that he upset the money market in Cairo and caused an inflationary period to ensue in the trade of the Mediterranean area that lasted for decades thereafter.

 

Mali continued strong until about 1450, at which time Songhai, the wealthiest and most powerful of these great West African empires, established rule over the region.  For at least a century and a half, Songhai featured one of the world’s greatest civilizations.  The heart of the empire nwas at about the midpoint alog the Niger River, where the kind of trade that had made Ghana and Mali such formidable forces in West Africa continued to flourish.  Songhai reached its height during the rule of Sonny Ali (r. 1464-1492) and Askia the Great (r. 1493-1528).  Urban life thrived on the basis of the region’s commercial vitality and on the elements of high civilization found in Islamic law, medicine, math, science, literature, architecture, art, and theology.  Djenne was on great city of Songhai.  Timbuktu was even greater.  To this latter scholars came from all over western Asia and Africa to exchange ideas, just as merchants exchanged goods and services.  Songhai’s great mosque of Sankore provided a fertile meeting ground for Muslim thinkers and people of all faith endeavoring to visit one of the world’s most important urban centers.  The mosque of Sankore represented a cultural continuity between the empires of Mali and Songhai, having been designed in the 14^th century by As-Saheli, one of the Egyptians brought back to Mali by Mansa Musa after his pilgrimage to Mecca in 1324.

 

Other Kingdoms and Societies of Africa

 

To the east of Songhai lay the Hausa states, including the notable Kano and Katsina, the development of which seems to have extended back into the 11^th century.  Bu the 14^th century, powerful kings ruled these domains, which feature substantial urban centers where craftspeople and merchants built prosperous livelihoods connected to the regional and trans-desert trade.  The Hausa states were particularly famous for their leatherwork, which yielded much sought-after items from the North;  European traders obtained these leather goods in the journeys to North African and came to them collectively as Moroccan leather.

 

In the central Sudan, around Lake Chad, lay another great state, Kanem-Bornu, the rulers of which had been Muslin from as early as the 11^th century.  One of the oldest and largest of the African states, Kanem-Bornu retained its independent existence until the latter years of the 19^th century, when European traders finally succeeded in bringing it under control. 

 

In the mountains toward the eastern end of the Sudanic belt lay Ethiopia, a Christian empire that was the successor state to Axum.   Monarchical states made a later appearance south of the Sudan, but empies such as the Benin and the Oro in Yorubaland (Nigeria), whose people produced some of the world’s great sculptures, flourished well before the arrival of the Europeans in the 15^th century.  African peoples in other part of the continent also established kingdoms and empoires, especially in the expansive territory south of the equator into which the Bantu language had spread.  

 

Over several millennia, a cluster of kingdoms flourished between the great lakes of East Africa, including Rwanda and Buganda.  South of the Congo (Zaire) forests lived the peoples of the Luba-Lunda group of kingdoms, and the monarchical state of Kongo emerged as a dominant force south of the river estuary that in colonial times (from the late 19^th century) would bear its name.

 

Much farther to the South, on the Zimbabwe-Rhodesian plateau, was the empire of Monomotapa, the wealth of which was derived from a lucrative trade in gold on the East African coast at sofala, a coastal outpost of the rich trading city of Kilwa.  Associated with this kingdom of Monomotapa was the Great Zimbabwe, a walled enclosure built mainly in  the 14^th and 15^th centuries n a site that ahd been used for ritual purpose since 1000 A. D. (CE).

 

General Characteristics of African Societies

 

Throughout these magnificent kingdoms and in those areas where a more decentralized style of governance prevailed, a wide variety of cultural styles described the lives of Africans.  West Africans were known for their skill as farmers and Artists.  They excelled in cultivating rice, building boats, and navigating along coasts.  Many were experts in producing textiles and baskets.  Others fashioned clothing from skins and fur.  Some became expert in producing weapons, utensils, and ceremonial objects from iron, copper, and precious stones.  Heights of artistry were reached by many West Africans who used these same materials to produce jewelry, metalwork, and sculpture.

 

The topography of Africa was and is enormously varied, featuring tropical forests, expansive deserts, and broad grassland.  Many African societies are matrilineal, with inheritance and property rights descended from the mother.  Many are also matrilocal, meaning that it is the groom who leaves his own family t live with or near the family of the bride.  Kinship was very important in traditional African society.  Ancestors are considered the links to the past, and descendants were considered the bridge to the future.  Both were part of the family broadly construed.  Typically hundreds of family members, including people of several generations, gathered together in clan associations to conduct common business and to maintain religious rituals preserving the lint to those who had lived before.

 

People in West African traditionally worshiped their ancestors, seen as the vital link between the supreme creator and the people of humankind and nature.  The indigenous religions of West Africa are animistic:  worshipers devote their ceremonies and ritual observations to spirits believed to dwell in animals, forests, rivers, and rocks.  Nature was and is seen as a thing worthy of respect, awe, care and caution.

 

The Enduring Legacy of Africa for African-Americans

 

The arrival of Europeans in the 15^th century would eventually alter the course of African history in ways that would be important not only to the people of the vast continent, but for the entire world, as well.  Later, in the 19^th and 20^th centuries, almost all of Africa would come under the control of

European colonial powers which exerted a might based on superior military hardware and oceangoing prowess.  More immediately important to the history of people of African origin in the Americas would be the slave trade that developed from the fifteenth century, following a pattern of commercial  interaction that included participants of four continents:  Africa, South America, North America, and Europe. 

 

Those people of African descent who were torn from their homeland came with a rich store of cultural treasure that people of European descent could not wrench from their brains, no matter how disrespectfully the slave traders abused African bodies.  The cultures of Africa, alive in the brains and bodies of those people brought to the American from Africa as slaves, would be one of the major cultural streams enriching the lives of people from the Western Hemisphere, including the United States.

 

II.  The Slave Trade and the Era of Slavery, 1500-1860

 

The Slave Trade

             

The slave trade developed as an extension of mercantilism, the doctrine that prevailed among the rising monarchies of Europe in the 15^th century, whereby each nation-state sought to maximize its profits via domestic and international trade in competition with other nations.   Since raw materials, finished goods, and markets could all be powerfully augmented by expanding the national territory across the globe, imperialism and colonialism became conceptually associated with mercantilism:  Control of territories overseas increased national access to raw materials, goods, and markets beyond the confines of the borders for Portugal, Spain, the Netherlands, France, and Great Britain.

 

Portugal was for a time in the very late 15^th century the leader in voyages of exploration.  The immediate motivation was direct access to the Spice Islands (today’s Indonesia).  At the time, Arabs operating across West Asia and Italians plying the Mediterranean Sea and surrounding areas frequently acted as two layers of middlepersons with which the nations of Europe had to deal in securing the spices that came mostly via overland routes to the Mediterranean.  Prince Henry the Navigator of Portugal navigated very little himself, but in 1488 he did send Bartholomew Dias down the western coast of Africa to the Cape of Good Hope at the southern tip of the continent;  and in 1498 his court trained and sponsored Vasco da Gama and his the crew aboard ships that went all the way around the Cape of Good Hope and on to the eastern coast of India in 1498. Subsequent trips took the Portuguese on through the seas of Southeast and East Asia, where they exerted a presence in today’s Indonesia, Malaysia, China, and Japan;  and establishing territorial  control at Macau, to the west of Hong Kong in southern China.

 

Meanwhile, the monarchical duo Ferdinand and Isabella of Spain sponsored four voyages of Columbus during 1492-1502.  That first voyage of 1492 landed on the island of Hispaniola, which in today’s world is split between the nations of Haiti and the Dominican Republic.  This was close enough to the American mainland to be credited for the European discovery of the Americas.  Native Americans had long since come through the Bering Straits from Asia and expanded over the territory that today is identified with North America, Central America, and South America.  But For Europeans this was very big news that Columbus did not find the Spice Islands that he set out to find via and all-water westerly route---  but did discover what for them (and also Asians and Africans) was a whole New World.

 

Having sailed for Spain, other Spaniards soon came to the Americas after Columbus.  Hernando Cortez conquered the Aztecs in 1521.  Francisco Pizarro conquered the Incas in 1536.  Vaso Nunez de Balboa looked out from the Isthmus of Panama to see that another ocean on the west---  the Pacific----  was looming close to the Atlantic that he could still see behind him to the east.

 

The Portuguese did establish a colony in today’s Brazil, but for a while, by the Treaty of Tordesillas, the Portuguese and Spain divided the previously imperialistically unclaimed world between them, with Spain presiding over the Western Hemisphere and Portugal roaming over the Eastern Hemisphere .  The Spaniards swept in with a vengeance to set up colonies in South American, Central America, islands of the Caribbean, Mexico, today’s Florida and the American Southwest from Texas to California.  In the Caribbean and South America especially, the Spaniards set up huge sugar plantations and mines that were enormously productive of silver and gold.

 

Both the mines and the plantations required heavy inputs of labor.  Great populations of Native American people had been wiped out with small pox and yellow fever;  those that remained knew the territory so well that they became adept escape artists when the Spaniards tried to put them to work on the plantations, whether as indentured servants or slaves.  But on the coast of African, the Portuguese and then the Spaniards discovered mighty the might nations the Dahomey, Ashanti, and others who were willing to trade their captives of war, prisoners, and criminals as slaves in exchange for weapons, metal goods, cloth, and alcoholic beverages.

 

The system that developed was lucrative for both African and European traders and devastating to the people traded and their families.  Europeans typically established what they called “factories” at coastal edge in West Africa or on nearby islands.  There they would set up large cages for the imprisonment of the human chattel for which they traded with the agents of the Dahomey, Ashanti, and others.  When enough slaves accumulated to fill a ship at an economically viable level, the human cargo was hustled aboard the ships and carried across the Atlantic Ocean through what was termed the Middle Passage to America.  The international commercial exchange was known as the Triangular Trade, whereby slaves were taken to work the sugar plantations and mines of South America, and the tobacco, rice, and cotton plantations of in the Old South of colonial North America;  the agricultural goods of the Americas were carried on to Europe for processing;  and goods from those European factories were then carried on to Africa, at which point the triangular process began again.

 

The trip across the Atlantic generally took four to five weeks.  There were three or more levels to the ships, just three feet or so apart, with slaves packed in horizontal position, scrunched into spots

five and one-half feet long and about sixteen inches wide.   There the slaves remained chained together, ankle to ankle and wrist to wrist as they lay in an accumulating filth of urine and excrement.  Once a week or so, the slaves were taken on deck to get a rinsing from pails of water, sometimes with requests from the crew to dance or skip or move in some frivolous fashion as the cleaning was taking place.

 

So horrid were ship conditions that about one in seven (approximately 15%) slaves died on the Middle Passage.  But this was part of the calculation.  The slave haul was so valuable in the aggregate that a few lives lost did not matter in crude terms of profit and loss.  Outlays for food and provisions on the ships were no more than necessary for the majority of the slaves to survive, with a few dead bodies carried on into port considered a rationally sustainable loss.

 

Slaves taken for work on the plantations and mines of South America were sold in such numbers that the purchaser just gave the hordes disembarking from the slave ships a quick look and packed them off to the plantation.  Slaves sold in places such as Charleston and New Orleans in the Old South were given more fastidious examination, in similar fashion to that of a horse trade.  Teeth and gums were examined to determine age.  Backs were examined for any sign of scars from cracking whips that might indicate a rebellious spirit.  A woman’s facial wrinkles and the condition of her legs and abdomen were assessed for child-bearing potential.  Prices for slaves ranged over time and place;  in Louisiana, the price of a field hand went up from about $500 in the early 19^th century to approximately $1,500 at the advent of the Civil War.

 

The slave trade was big business.  The imperial and eventually the industrial might of European empires depended on the goods that resulted from unpaid labor.  Slave ship owners and speculators regularly realized three-fold returns on their investments.  Returns could be even greater when the goods for which slaves were in exceptionally high demand.   But the vagaries of weather and health could also wipe out an investment and bring economic ruin to a ship owner who had bet too heavily on the returns of single ship.  On balance, though, the slave trade was hugely profitable and a huge factor in the economic growth of the nascent capitalist economies of Europe, especially those of Great Britain, Belgium, the Netherlands, and Germany.

 

In the course of the late 17^th century and the 18^th century, Great Britain defeated Dutch and French rivals in wars and secured agreements that gave that nation preeminence in the slave trade.  Wealth gained from the slave trade played a vital role in the growth and maintenance of the British Empire.  Two-thirds of the African slaves sold by British traders went to non-British purchasers;  one-third went to fellow Britons.  Through the 17^th century, ship owners from London still played an important role, but in the course of the 18^th century the cities of Bristol and Liverpool came to overshadow London as locations for ship owners and investors.  By 1795, Liverpool dominated five-eighths of the British slave trade and three-sevenths of the entire European slave trade.

 

African Americans in The American Revolution and the Founding to the United States

 

When war broke out between the British imperial powerhouse and the upstart American colonists in 1775, people of African provenance, whether free blacks or those of slave status shrewdly calculated their interests.  A given African American might well ask at least these two questions:

Should I fight with the British, believing promises that doing so will bring freedom from plantation masters in the American South?

 

Or should I fight with the Americans and trust that a war for the cause of liberty will result in my own?    

In all, approximately 5,000 African Americans, mostly free blacks, fought on the side of the Americans.  Another 1,000 people of African descent who had been in slave status gained their freedom by fighting with the British army.  African Americans served as combat troops with both armies.  They also conducted missions of espionage and performed a variety of practical tasks:  clearing roads, cooking meals, hauling equipment, repairing bridges, and driving wagons transporting officers, troops, weaponry, and supplies. 

 

From the beginning, African Americans were involved in famous events leading up to and through the American Revolution.  Crispus Attucks was among those killed in the Boston Massacre of 5 March 1770.  Lemuel Haynes was among the Minutemen who gathered to defend the Concord Bridge in Concord, Masschusetts, on the day (April 1775) of the “shot heard round the world.”  Peter Salem also fought at Concord, and he was a mainstay in the battles of Bunker Hill (1775), Saratoga (1777), and Stony Point (1779);  he is credited with some for fatally wounding British Major General John Pitcairn at Bunker Hill, and he appears in a painting by John Trumbull, an artist who captured many key moments in the American revolution on canvass.  Primas Black and Epheram Blackman of Ethan Allen’s Green Mountain Boys participated in the capture of Fort Ticonderoga.  Other male African American soldiers whose names gained a place in historical records for having fought in the American Revolution against the British are Pomp Blackman, Samuel Craft, Prince Estabrook, Caesar Ferrit, John Ferrit (Caesar’s son), Barzillai Lew, and Cuff Whittemore.   African American women were among those who fought on the American side:  The memoirs of African American poet Lucy Terry Prince (1730-1821) tell how black women disguised as men fought the British in various battles waged over the full course of the conflict.

 

Up until the end of the colonial period, white colonists prevented African Americans from serving as soldiers.  Whites feared that giving blacks guns would encourage black-on-white violence and even full-scale revolution.  Some whites perpetuated the myth that blacks were inferior and incapable of acquiring the skills of the soldier.  But when war came, many of the colonies, especially those of the North, gave permission to African Americans to wield guns against the British.  Apparently the fear of African Americans bearing arms returned in the aftermath of the American Revolution:  In 1792, Congress passed a law restricting military service to free white men.

 

Upon the founding of the new nation, and after the first attempt at a general statement of constitutional principles in the Articles of Confederation (1781) failed to provide for an effective central government, James Madison took responsibility for writing the United States Constitution of the United States that went into effect in 1789.  Many of the founders, even those who were slaveholders, realized that there was an abiding ironic cruelty in the maintenance of slavery as an institution in a nation whose constitution reflected the ideals of the Enlightenment or Age of Reason.   They knew that as a matter of principle, liberty and justice for humanity should include all of those who are human. 

 

But slavery was a contentious issue that could have torn the young nation apart in a sectional fight involving those whose livelihoods depended on slave labor and those who were not invested in, or morally objected to, the institution of slavery.

 

So Madison finessed the language a bit, avoiding the term, “slave,” but at three points in the United States Constitution, identifying issues of law that most definitely pertained specifically to African Americans.  In Article I, Section 2 reference is made to “other persons” who were to be counted as “three-fifths” of a full human being in each state for purposes of determining level of representation in the House of Representatives of the United States Congress.  And in Article I, Section 9, Madison writes that “the importation of certain persons” could cease as of 1808 and empower the United States Congress to place a tax on such persons brought into the United States thereafter;  reference was clearly to the slave trade.  And in Article IV, Madison writes that anyone escaping from bondage should be returned to the party who owned their labor.

                                                                                                                        

Thus it was that the world’s greatest document of national governance, embodying the general principles of the Enlightenment and embracing the phraseology of John Locke in guaranteeing “life, liberty, and property” (5^th and 14^th Amendments) to citizens, did little to protect life for African Americans, implicitly denied them liberty, and not only failed to guarantee them right to property but rather considered them property guaranteed for ownership by others.

 

Slavery on the Plantations of the American South

 

Slavery existed throughout the American colonies during the 16^th and 17^thcenturies, and through most of the 18^th century in the run-up to the Revolutionary War against the British.  In the North, slave owning tended to be on a small scale, with slaves to work as personal and household servants, on loading docks, in workshops and then in small factories;  only a few worked on the small farms of New England, upper New York, Jew Jersey, and Pennsylvania.  In the aftermath of the American Revolution, the northern states one after another terminated slavery, so that during the more than half-century that ensued before the Civil War, there developed great economic and social distinctions between the North and the South.

 

Slaves in the American South most notably worked on large plantations given at first to tobacco (especially in the Virginia and the Carolinas), rice throughout the humid lower South from Florida to Louisiana), and sugarcane (especially in Florida and Lousiana).  But they also work on small farms, some with just a few slaves, others with about twenty.  Then there were huge plantations of hundreds and even thousands of acres where slaves worked on large-scale agricultural operations that brought owners enormous wealth.  The largest of the plantations had the look of towns and even small cities, featuring a coterie of slave laborers who wove cloth, sewed clothes, made shoes, constructed furniture and buildings, shoed horses, sawed lumber, forged iron implements, and milled flour.

 

Most slaves, though, were field hands who did backbreaking, intellectually empty work day after day, from sun up to sun down, at least six days a week.  With the invention of Eli Whitney’s cotton gin in 1793, the separation of seeds from the main fiber became much easier and cost-

effective, motivating planters to give at first more and then most acreage to cotton plants.  Slaves laboring in the nasty work of cotton picking were typically expected to fill sacks of 250 pounds of cotton a day or face a whipping.  The most adept pickers of cotton might raise their productivity to 400 pounds---  although many with that capability refrained from doing so in order to promote rising expectations on the part of the plantation owner, overseer, and slave driver.

 

Even at nightfall the work of the slave went on.  Slaves still chopped wood, mended tools, and fed the cows, pigs and chickens.  By the time they could even return to their quarters, many slaves had little time to do much else than to fall into bed and get a good enough night’s sleep to begin another round of work the next day.

 

Children of slaves automatically assumed the status of their parents.  At the age of five or six, slave children might do minor tasks in the “Big House” of the master and family, or they might help in the fields, fetching water, picking up stones and other clutter, or collect and dispose of garbage.  At about ten years old, both female and male slave children began to do regular field work, very often meaning picking cotton.

 

Slave quarters were typically one or two room shacks holding as many as twelve residents.  During the 17^th and 18^th centuries, the dwellings were generally roofed with thatch, then in the 1th century log cabins were common.  The cabins were hot in summer and cold in winter, particularly overnight in the latter case, since the slave generally was issued little more than a thin cotton blanket to use as she or he slept on a mattress made of straw.  Slaves generally made their own simple wooden furniture and adapted gourds for use as bowls and jugs;  sometimes the master would provide forks and spoons, but frequently slaves had to fashion these for themselves, as well.

 

Status distinctions among slaves followed an order that began at the Big House with those slaves who worked as butlers, servers, cooks, sewers of clothes, tailors, nannies, carriage drivers, and gardeners.  Out in the fields, working generally under a white overseer, was an often African American  slave driver.  Slave drivers wielded a high level of authority, but the elevated rank of position came awkwardly, because success depended on exploitation of fellow African Americans;  the slave driver had to be careful about acquiring a reputation for unnecessary cruelty, because he still had to dwell among and command the cooperation of other slaves, who could make life uncomfortable for him if he was judged to wield his power with little regard for their welfare.   

 

Slaves who lived and worked in the Big House ate better than did field slaves.  They often ate some of what the kitchen claves cooked for the family of the master.  Field slaves, though, made do with a diet in which flour, cornmeal, and lard provided much of the caloric value.  Milk was plentiful on the farm, and beans served as a good source of protein.  Slaves were ingenious about finding good things from nature’s bounty to supplement the meals put together from rations put together by the slave owner.  They hunted all manner of wild game and gathered a wide variety of edible plants, fruit, and nuts from the fields and forests in and near the farm.  Inventively using herbs and animal fats, slaves turned the wild game and plants of their immediate environment into masterpieces of the culinary art.

 

Living Lives of Accomplishment in the Face of Injustice

 

Although the life of the slave was laborious and the working hours long, there was some time left over for recreation, amusement, and personal accomplishment.  Many slaves became superb hunters and fishers, planted masterful gardens, and play tunes on homemade instruments that would prove to be the progenitors of the blues and jazz genres that are at the soul of American music.  Some

resourceful slaves cultivated reputations for good behavior that won them off-plantation passes from lenient masters;  given access to a wider circle of associations, some slaves learned how to read and write.  This knowledge might also come from a comparatively compassionate member of the master’s family, either with or without the master’s permission. 

 

Free blacks also often reached out to their fellow African Americans by providing instruction in reading, writing, and subjects for which those skills served as gateway.  African Americans of free status occasionally founded schools, as did those among the white population who opposed slavery and sought to elevate the educational and cultural level of slaves and former slaves.  A free black by the name of Elias Neua, who had been born in France, operated a school for African Americans by 1704.  Records indicate that a couple of slaves whose given names were Harry and Andrew (surnames unknown) ran a school for basic reading and writing instruction in South Carolina during the early 18^th century.  For a period beginning in 1751, missionary and teacher Joseph Ottolenghi taught slaves in Georgia at the behest of the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts. 

 

The Quaker Anthony Benezet ran an evening school for African Americans out of his home during 1750-1760;  a group of Quakers also came together in 1774 to run a school for African Americans in Philadelphia.  And in 1787, the New York Society for Promoting the Manumission of Slaves established the New York African Free School, generally credited as the first full-curriculum school for African Americans.     

 

Most African Americans eventually became Christians, although some, especially at first, incorporated animistic beliefs into their new faith.  They also very notably drew upon African music to enliven standard Christian hymns and to create spirituals unique to African American people.  From the African American Christian tradition came much of the impetus for blues and jazz motifs that in turn shaped all music that is American in origin.

 

For a mostly enslaved people, contributions in many fields were mighty.  In 1721, a Massachusetts slave named Oneissimus taught the famous religious leader Cotton Mather how to inject a patient with a small amount of the small pox virus to create a vaccine effect.  A South Carolina slave named Caesar developed antidotes to rattlesnake venom.  Also in South Carolina, the slave Wilcie Elfe gained medical knowledge from an owner-doctor, opened a successful pharmaceutical practice in Charleston, patented effective medicines, and sold his curatives throughout the state.  Similarly, the slave James Derham studied under owner Dr. Robert Dove, from whom he purchased his freedom and then set up his own medical practice.  During the 18^th century, former slave David K. McDonough gained fame for his skill as a vision and hearing specialist, displayed at his own Eye and Ear Infirmary in New York.  

 

According to the census of 1860, there were 488,070 free blacks in a total African American population of 4,441,770 (with the slave population, therefore, at 3,953,700 [having grown from 697,897 since 1790]).  Hence, free blacks constituted about 11% of the total African American population in the United States just prior to the Civil War.  Over half of these free African Americans lived in the South. 

 

Freedom had come in a variety of ways.  Some white masters freed offspring that resulted from intercourse with black slaves, thus hoping to avoid social censure.  Once in a great while, a slave was so enterprising as to secure off-plantation wage labor, in addition to her or his toil as human chattel, and make enough money to purchase freedom from masters implicitly more lenient and empathetic than most.  As the abolitionist movement gained momentum, some southerners felt the tweak of conscience that could give a slave her or his freedom, as reward for faithful service, or just because it seemed the right thing to do.  Other slaves were freed by the terms of wills.  Some survived the mad dash for freedom, moving across fields and through woods just ahead of sniffing dogs and scurrying agents of the master, against the intent of the fugitive property provisions of the United States Constitution and statutory law. 

 

Some free African Americans themselves owned slaves.  Some of these were carpenters, shoemakers, and tailors who bought slaves and made them apprentices.  The 1830 census recorded 753 slaveholding African Americans.  The 1850 census recorded that 19% of black tailors in Charleston, South Carolina, owned slaves.  Slaves worked for free blacks as maids or day laborers and, in a few cases, they worked the fields picking cotton or harvesting, much as they did for white slave owners. 

 

William Johnson, a freed slave living in in Natchez Mississippi became a multi-business entrepreneur, running barbershops, purchasing and renting out property, and superintending a money-lending business;  hiring managers to run businesses selling toys, wallpaper, coal, and sand;  renting carts and other vehicles;  offering a service watering down the  streets of the hot southern city of Natchez;  and accumulating 350 acres of land on which he put fifteen slaves to work chopping down timber and farming the fields.  New Orleans merchant Cecee McCarty trained slaves as salespeople who peddled imported dry goods across the state of Louisiana;  in time, she amassed a fortune.

 

But black slave owners were a tiny portion of the free African American population.   Most free African Americans worked as laborers or skilled crafts people;  some entered the professions or started businesses.  Paul Cuffe (1759-1817) operated a thriving shipbuilding business in Connecticut, gained great wealth, and trained other African Americans to start businesses of their own.  James Forten 1766-1842) also made a fortune in the maritime industry, inventing a device to handle sails more efficiently and launching a company that employed a total of 40 employees, including on his payroll both African American and white workers.  At mid-19^th century, William Whipper of Pennsylvania began his entrepreneurial career as a clothes cleaner, became an expert in steam scouring, and prospered so greatly as to pour investments into multiple successful business ventures.  Tax records from the mid-19th century indicate that there were 21 African American entrepreneurs in New York City making over $100,000 per year, thus earning what for that era was a huge amount of money.

 

African Americans of the pre-Civil War era made huge contributions with their scientific inventions.  Benjamin Banneker (1731-1806) compiled The Pennsylvania, Delaware, Maryland, and Virginia Almanac and Ephemeris, published annually from 1791 to 1802;  he also served on the commission that planned the construction of a new capital at Washington, D. C., in 1789, then from 1790 was among those commissioned to survey the site for the future capital.  Henry Blair received a patent for a unique seed planter in 1834.  Norbert Rillieux (1806-1894) received a patent in 1846 for a vacuum evaporator that produced white sugar crystals from sugarcane juice and proved also to have

utility in the production of soap, gelatin, and glue.  Lewis Temple (1800-1854) invented a harpoon that revolutionized the whaling industry, given the enhanced effectiveness of his invention for hunting the huge oceangoing mammals whose bodies were used for the production of many commercially lucrative goods;   Temple, though, never gained much from the commerce induced by his invention:  he never was able to gain a patent and died penniless in the very city of Bedford, Massachusetts, whose economy had boomed on the strength of his invention.  

 

The entrepreneurial success and inventiveness of African Americans in the early 19th century was not rewarded with citizenship, which was obviously denied to slaves but also withheld from free

blacks.  Free blacks in Maryland and North Carolina had to have special licenses to sell corn, wheat, or tobacco.  In most states of both the North and the South, free blacks could not vote, hold public office, or testify in courts against whites.  African Americans could not carry weapons in this era of commonplace white gun-wielding.  Failure to pay off debts or remit tax payments resulted in fine or imprisonment for free blacks of the North;  in the South, such a debtor or tax offender could be sold into slavery as means to collect the sums owed.

 

African American artisans, entrepreneurs, inventors, journalists, and professionals formed a small but energetic black middle class that grew restive with the conditions of American life, at the same time that their success provided powerful arguments against the racist pronouncements and assumptions that pervaded white-dominated society.  African Americans were in large measure responsible for establishing the economy and physical infrastructure of the United States.  They designed and constructed churches, mansions, public buildings, and private plantations.  John Hemings is famous for his role in producing articles and fixtures for the Monticello, the plantation of Thomas Jefferson in Virginia.  Hemings was a slave at Monticello, but he was no field hand.  He was a joiner by trade and a genius who created numerous exquisite pieces of furniture in the woodworking shop that he ran on Jefferson’s plantation.  Following Jefferson’s sketches, Hemings turned out chairs, tables, benches, fine railings, arches, and window shutters.

 

African Americans in the growing urban centers of the North generally faced prospects of inadequate public education facilities, inferior housing, and lack of legal protections that white citizens held as a matter of birth.  And they face numerous challenges beyond the strictly legal:  A white mob attacked a community of predominately African American residents in Cincinnati, Ohio, in 1829;  similar incidents occurred in a number of northern cities where newly arrived black immigrants competed with workers for jobs.  During the decade after the riot in Cincinnati, most southern and some northern states limited or banned the immigration of free blacks.

 

In this context of the sheer cruelty perpetuated against slaves and the vexing legal injustices inflicted against free blacks, an inexorable momentum built for the abolition of slavery and the establishment of full citizenship rights for all African Americans.

 

African Americans in the Abolitionist Movement

 

African Americans were prominent in the abolitionist movement.  Sojourner Truth, Harriet Tubman, and Frederick Douglass have gained considerable recognition in most standard accounts of the abolitionist era:

                                                                                     

Sojourner Truth was born into slavery in 1797 then, after years of physical and emotional abuse, gained her freedom when the state of New York terminated slavery as a legal institution in 1827.  Sojourner Truth cut a formidable figure as a tall, forceful speaker who gave ringing orations, some planned and others spontaneous, at numerous conventions.   She was a suffragette and women’s rights advocate, as well as abolitionist.  Sojourner Truth famously rose from her seat at a gathering in upstate New York in 1851 to time and again issue the refrain, “Ain’t I a woman?” as a rhetorical response to a man who had characterized women as fragile creatures needing help to get into carriages and step over mud puddles.  She said, for example,

 

Nobody helps me into carriages and over mud puddles, or gives me any best place!

And ain’t I a woman?  Look at me!  Look at my arm!  I have ploughed and planted

and gathered into barns, and no man could head me!  And ain’t I a woman?

I could work as much and eat as much as a man---  when I could get it---  and

bear the lash, as well!  And ain’t I a woman?

 

Frederick Douglass (1817-1895) was born to slavery in Maryland but escaped to New York in 1838.  He taught himself to read and write, read voraciously, and used his gift for oratory to propel him to the forefront of the abolitionist movement.  His North Star was one of the first abolitionist newspapers in the United States.  Douglass continued to be a figure of major importance, the greatest advocate for African American rights, in the years after the Civil War (1861-1865) and even after the Compromise of 1877 ended Reconstruction.  Douglass worked through his disappointment with the Republican Party, the party of Lincoln and a putative advocate of citizenship rights for all, by calling for a clear-eyed view of that party’s failure to fulfill its promises to the African American people.  But he never lost faith in the United States Constitution as a document enunciating principles on the basis of which liberty for all could eventually be realized:

 

If the Republican Party cannot take a call for justice and fair play, it ought to go

down…  Parties were made for people, not people for the parties…  if liberty, with us,

is but a sham, and our suffrage thus far only a cruel mockery, we may yet congratulate

ourselves upon the fact that the laws and institutions of our country are sound, just,

and liberal. 

 

Harriet Tubman gained her fame especially for her work as a “conductor” on the Underground Railroad, the system of pathways and hideaways by which escaped slaves made their way to freedom in the North, to states such as Ohio and Pennsylvania, and often on to Canada.  She was born a slave in Maryland but in 1849 walked a hundred miles to freedom in Pennsylvania.  Tubman made the trip back to the South fifteen times to guide at least 100 slaves to freedom;  these included her parents and six of her ten siblings.  A $400 bounty was placed on her head, but neither she nor her “passengers” ever got caught.

 

Less famous but hugely important were African abolitionists such as Letitia Still and William Still, who time after time offered their home as a station for passengers on the Underground Railroad.  Arthur Tappan, Lewis Tappan, and Theodore Dwight Weld brought several small groups together as the American Anti-Slavery Society in 1833.  Martin Delaney helped Frederick Douglass launch the North Star and then penned many a pungent anti-slavery tract.  Prominent Philadelphia church leaders Thomas Gray, Absalom Jones, and Richard Allen wrote lengthy essays against both slavery and discriminatory treatment of African Americans.  John B. Russworm and Samuel E.Cornish were among the first prominent African American journalists, having established the very first black newspaper in 1827.

 

Efforts by people such as these helped create an atmosphere in which the Republican Party was founded upon a platform for abolition that was actually quite moderate and gradualist.  But the fact that a mainstream, white-dominated party could be advocating for the termination of involuntary servitude was worrisome enough for southern stakeholders to induce Civil War. 

 

III.  Civil War and Reconstruction, 1861-1877

 

The Civil War

 

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 54^th 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 54^th 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 13^th Amendment to the United States Constitution, ending slavery;  the 14^th Amendment granting citizenship rights to people of all ethnicities and regardless of “previous condition of servitude”;  and the 15^th 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 14^th 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 of 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 19^th 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 20^th 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.    

 

IV.  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 3^rd 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 14^th 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 15^th 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:  Statistices 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 19^th century into the 20^th 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 20^th 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 20^th 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 20^th 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 20^th 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 92^nd and 93^rd divisions.  These soldiers served with great distinction:  The all-black 369^th Infantry Regiment (known as the “Harlem Hell Fighters”) compiled the best record of any United States Army regiment.  African American soldiers of the 370^th 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 24^th 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 13^th, 14^th, and 15^th 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 20^th 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 17^th 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 a 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 20^th 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.

 

Depression, War, and a New Deal for African America

 

The Great Depression that began with the stock market crash of 29 October 1929 fell hard on African America.  Most blacks in the south toiled as sharecroppers or as laborers on other people’s farms, so when landowners ran into economic difficulty, black framers had to scramble for work.  But in the South, other work was rare, and the North did not offer much hope during the 1930s:  Whites who had come to eschew certain kinds of labor eagerly took jobs that they had formerly rejected.  Left with few options, the downcast African American worker of the South was the most economically devastated figure of the Great Depression.

 

During the Great Depression, the capitalist system seemed to many to be failing, and in that context interest in communism increased.  Leaders of the Communist Party made a special effort to recruit disaffected African Americans, and the party nominated African American James Ford as vice-presidential candidate in 1932, 1936, and 1940.  The African American laboring people of the urban North, while making some progress in gaining acceptance into unions, in general still found membership difficult to obtain, and in terms of work availability and work conditions they fared poorly.  Asa Philip Randolph emerged as a major figure in labor leadership, superintending the formation of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters in August 1925 that culminated a dozen years later (25 August 1937) in better wages and work conditions for the African American porters who worked for the Pullman Company, which dominated the sleeping car industry aboard railroads.

 

Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal gave hope to many in the United States, African Americans included, and his administration featured notable advances in the cause of black citizenship.  The United States, though, was still a very segregated society.  As a rule, African Americans stayed in the camps of the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC) longer than whites, moved less readily into administrative poistiions, and were confined to 10% of total enrollment.  Approximately 50,000 African Americans wre served by the CCC and another 64,000 young African Americans found work through the National Youth Administration (NYA).  The education program of the Works Progress Administration (WPA) employed over 5,000 African Americans in leadership and supervisory positions, taught basic literacy to almost 25,000 black students, and provided training in skills transferrable to jobs in business, industry, and the trades.  The WPA was led by Harry Hopkins, an enlightened individual who maneuvered to get policies established making discrimination based on race, creed, or color illegal.

                                                                                                                                       

As part of the New Deal, the Federal Writers Project (FWP) abetted the careers of African American authors Horace R. Crayton, St. Clair Drake, Ralph Ellison, Zora Neal Hurston, and Richard Wright.  The Federal Music Project, Federal Art Project, and Federal Theater Project also supported the work of creative African Americans, producing concerts, supporting hundreds of black sculptors and painters (including very notably Horace Pippin and Jacob Lawrence), and employing 500 African Americans for theater productions in New York City.  The works of Hall Johnson (Run Little Chillun) Rudolf Fischer (Conjure Man Dies:  a Mystery Tale of Harlem [an adaptation of William Shakespeare’s Macbeth]) gained production under the aegis of the Federal Theater Project.  Many African American creative artists such as dancer and choreographer Katherine Dunham and actor Rex Ingram went on to exciting and seminal careers in the aftermath of the Great Depression and the programs of the New Deal.  

 

Eleanor Roosevelt was instrumental in getting her husband to create a “Black Cabinet” to provide advice to the president on New Deal policies.  Roosevelt appointed African American educator Mary McCleod Bethune to head the Division of Negro Affairs within the National Youth Administration, and it was she who organized the Black Cabinet.  The group included Robert L. Vann, editor of the Pitsburgh Currier, who held a post in the office of the attorney general;  William H. Hastie, a civil rights attorney who served in the Department of Justice;  Robert D. Weaver, an economist serving in the Department of the Interior;  Lawrence A. Oxley, a social worker in the Department of Labor;  and Edgar Brown, president of the United Government Employees and an official in the Civilian Conservation Corps.  Other African Americans tapped for positions in the Roosevelt administration included E. K. Jones, on leave from the National Urban League, at the Department of Commerce;  Ira Reid on the Social Security Board; and Ambrose Carver at the Office of Education.

 

Eleanor Roosevelt served as a conduit to the president for congresspersons seeking his support for legislation, notably Walter White in behalf of his anti-lynching bill.  The spouse of the president arranged for Marian Anderson to sing at the Lincoln Memorial when the Daughters of the American Revolution (DAR) denied the famous soprano the opportunity to perform in Constitution Hall.  Eleanor Roosevelt was a hugely important figure at a time when so many Americans held virulently racist views, absorbing the political heat, educating her husband on issues of racial equity, and prodding his conscience as necessary.

 

The New Deal put millions of Americans back to work and lifted the spirits of the nation, but the economic stimulus provided by the need for the material goods of warfare meant that World War II (1939-1945) was really responsible for ending the Great Depression.  About 1,000,000 African Americans served in the armed forces during World War II, including several thousand women in the women’s Auxiliary Army Corps (WACS).  About 500,000 soldiers served in either the European or Asia/ Pacific theaters of the war, typically in segregated units in technically noncombat positions (quartermaster, engineer, ordinance handler, and transport provider).  But the 92^nd Infantry, 93^rd Infantry, 761^st Tank Battalion, 614^th Tank Destroyer Battalion, and 593^rd Field Artillery provide examples of military units in which African Americans served with great distinction in direct combat during World War II.  Bernie Robinson became the first African American officer in 1942;  by war’s end there were 50 such African American officers in the military forces of the United States.

 

African American pilots charted some of he most remarkable achievements of World War II.  The most famous of these was the 332^nd Fighter Group, better known as the Tuskegee Airmen.  Graduates of the segregated pilot program in Tuskegee, Alabama, this accomplished group of aiment flew escort planes, charged with the duty of protecting heavy bombers;  in more than two hundred missions, they never lost an escorted plane to the Germans or other opponents, and they managed to sink a German navy destroyer with aircraft gunfire.

 

At Pearl Harbor, mess attendant Dorie Miller positioned himself at a machine gun and shot down at least four Japanese aircraft.  Miller was honored with the Navy Cross for heroism but was promoted only to mess attendant first class and, sadly, died aboard a small carrier craft torpedoed by the Japanese on 24 November 1943.

 

African American physician Charles Drew oversaw establishment of the first blood bank in New York City, following with similar efforts at the request of Great Britain and for the Red Cross back in the United States.  A sad demise, though, also was the reality for the man who had saved so many lives as an expert in hematology.  Drew died in the aftermath of an automobile accident in North Carolina, driving himself to a meeting in order to avoid segregated transportation.  The segregated hospital gto which he was admitted lacked the blood plasma that might have saved his life. 

 

African Americans did, though, see gains in many facets of American life during the last years of World War II and the years immediately following.  Executive Order 8802 prohibited employment discrimination in industries producing war goods.  Before 1948, 78% of African Americans earned under $3,800 per year.  Between1948 and 1961, that percentage would decrease to 47%, and during the same period the percentage of African Americans earning over $100,000 increased from less than 1% to about 17%.  One could also see that the efforts of the NAACP to improve the legal and social climate for African American college attendance was producing favorable results:  Whereas in 1947, the number of African American college students was 124,000, by 1964 this figure had almost doubled, to 233,000.  In politics, Adam Clayton Powell of New York City won a seat in the House of Representatives and, buoyed by a strong and devoted following back home, strode in to barbershops, dining rooms, and showers that had previously been segregated.

 

The Immediate Aftermath of World War II

 

During World War II and its aftermath, the NAACP pressed ahead with its initiatives to open institutions of higher learning, with the ultimate objective of bringing about total desegregation odf all public schools, whether K-12, college, or university.  Court action had successively culminated in the desegregation for Missouri Law School and set a precedent for the integration of other professional schools.

 

Under the sway of enthusiasm for the New Deal and the efforts of Eleanor Roosevelt, African American voters began to vote for most often for Democrats, distancing themselves from a Republican Party that no longer seemed very much like the party of Lincoln.  In 1954, African Americans provided the margin of victory for the candidacies of black politicians running for seats in the United States House of Representatives;  these included Augustus Hawkins of California, William L. Dawson of Illinois, as well as Clayton Powell (who was reelected).

 

And in that very year of 1954, Thurgood Marshall led a team of NAACP lawyers to landmark victory in the Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas, ending desegregations and ushering in the Civil Rights Movement that at long last ended the Period That Never Should Have Been, that stretch of time extending from the Compromise of 1877 until the Brown v. Board decision of 1954.

 

Not until the middle 1970s, though, did various efforts to implement desegregation of the schools and federal programs advancing African American citizenship, terms of employment, and freedom of residence manifest themselves in significant changes in American society.  So we may think of the Period That Never Should Have Been for Extending one hundred years:

 

This should deepen our lament for the brutal experience of African Americans in the history of the United States, raise our respect for African American accomplishment in the midst of terrifying conditions of life, and impel us to address the many concerns that still abide for African Americans living at the urban core throughout the nation. 

 

V.  The Civil Rights Movement, 1954-1972

 

The Cases and Incidents tht Galvanized a Movement

 

In the town of Topeka, Kansas, in 1950, there were two elementary schools, one for African American children, the other for white children.  Seven year-old Linda Brown , African American of ethnicity, lived just four blocks from the school for white for children but across town from the school for black kids.  Linda Brown’s father lost a case filed in behalf of his daughter in the lower courts, but his attorneys persisted with an appeal to the Supreme Court of the United States, which accepted the case and assigned its appellation in joint consideration of similar cases that had been referred on appeal to the Supreme Court.  In 1954, Chief Justice Earl Warren wrote the case for the unanimous opinion in favor of Brown and by extension those who had filed the other cases, asserting that “in the field of public education the doctrine of ‘separate but equal’ has no place.  Separate educational facilities are inherently unequal  

 

In August 1955 a fourteen year-old African American Emmett Till of Chicago, visiting relatives in Mississippi, sustained a fatal shot to the head from two white men who claimed that the youth had “talked fresh” to a white woman.  Till was beaten so badly that his face was unrecognizable, as gained wide notice when photos were fun in Jet magazine, the Chicago Defender (a prominent and venerable black-owned newspaper), and in time the mainstream white media.

 

On 1 December 1955, a department store seamstress named Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat at the front of the black section of a bus in Montgomery, Alabama, as requested by a white person.  When she was arrested, her connections as a local civil rights worker sent forth a concatenation of responses, including those from African American community leader E. D. Nixon, attorney Cliffor Durr, and Alabama State College English Professor Jo Ann Robinson.  Montgomery pastor Martin Luther King, who led Dexter Avenue Baptist Church responded reluctantly to the call to head a movement that burgeoned into a 12-month boycott that culminated in the 13 November 1956 decision of the Supreme Court of the United States that determined that Montgomery’s segregated bus system was unconstitutional.

                                                                       

Martin Luther King, who had been satisfied with developing himself professionally as a local pastor, knew that his gifts now had to be employed in a wider effort that became the Civil Rights Movement.  He assumed the position at the helm of the southern Christian Leadership Conference, employing a disciplined nonviolent approach adapted from the satyagraha movement of Mohandas K. Gandhi that had played a major role in winning independence for India from Great Britain in 1947.

 

Multiple Assertions of African American Rights, 1957-1963

 

The years 1957-1963 were replete with nonviolent actions meant to induce changes in practices that had continued for at least eighty years in the Jim Crow South, as well as for many decades in the urban North:

 

In 1957, President Dwight D. Eisenhower called in the National Guard to protect the entry of nine African American high school students (Minniejean Brown, Elizabeth Eckford, Ernest Green, Thelma Mothershed, Melba Patillo, Gloria Ray, Terrance Roberts, Jefferson Thomas, and Carlotta Walls) into Central High School of Little Rock, Arkansas.  Hatemongering whites had mounted a massive intimidation effort that called forth heroic feats of courage on the part of local NAACP president Daisy Bates and others, but not until Eisenhower sent in the troops did the white antagonists have to relent.

The students who came to be known as the Little Rock Nine entered the halls of Central High School,  and senior Ernest Green moved forward to graduation in spring 1958.

 

Martin Luther King continued to be the most prominent Civil Rights leader, but other organizations formed to work for the cause of African American Rights: 

 

The Congress of Racial Equality (CORE, formed back in 1942 by James Farmer) worked out of a head office in Chicago and was at the forefront of many sit-ins for the desegregation of public lunch counters, restrooms, parks, theaters, and schools.   

 

In 1960, 300 students came together at the behest Ellas Baker, a militant member of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, to form the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC).  By 1962, a Harvard-educated SNCC teacher by the name of Robert Moses came was heading SNCC, organizing a highly effective and disciplined staff working to ensure the right to vote in the South.

 

Late in 1960, Martin Luther King was arrested on a charge of disturbing the peace in Birmingham, Alabama.  A call from Robert Kennedy, brother of John Kennedy, made a call that culminated in King’s release.  This action did a great deal to swing the black vote in the 1960 presidential election toward Democrat John Kennedy in his race against Republican Richard Nixon, thereby garnering the support of needed votes in a close contest.   

 

In 1961 came the Freedom Rides that produced such a dangerous showdown in Birmingham, Alabama, and impelled Robert Kennedy, Attorney General in his brother’s administration, to pressure southern bus companies and state governments to comply with federal law so as to comply with follow desegregated and nondiscriminatory policy regarding public transportation.  In 1962 the National Guard in  Mississippi was called in to protect the right of African American student James Meredith to enter the University of Mississippi.  Meredith had National Guard escorts to classes, and at their peak troops stationed on the university’s campus totaled 20,000.  Troops were still necessary when Meredith (who arrived as a transfer student with numerous previously earned credits) went through the graduation ceremony in August 1963.  

 

Then in that very month, on 28 August 1963, came the March on Washington which catapulted Martin Luther King to even higher national prominence.  Following the original vision of A. Philip Randolph, the various groups working in the Civil Rights Movement worked with meticulous effectiveness to bring forth 250,000 people, who gathered at the Lincoln Memorial to hear a litany of speakers on the cause of civil rights.  Of the many eloquent speakers, Martin Luther King shown brightest of all with his ringing oratory in what has come to be known as the “I Have a Dream” speech.  This piece of oratory moved many people in the United States who were watching on television or listening on the radio.  The speech was a mighty call for the logical extension of morality and justice embedded in both the Bible and the United States Constitution to the realms of law and human relationships, envisioning among many other stirring images that day when “right down there in Alabama, with its governor having his lips dripping with the words of interposition and nullification, little black boys and black girls will join hands with little white boys and white girls and walk as sisters and brothers.”

                                                                                                                   

These many events from the momentous years 1957-1963, culminating in the enormously powerful March on Washington inspired Lyndon Baines Johnson to use all of his political skills to induce the United States Congress to pass the 1964 Civil Rights Act, giving statutory enforcement power to guarantees of citizenship in the 14^th Amendment;  and the 1965 Voting Rights Act, similarly making clear the imperative for all states to follow the 15^th Amendment guaranteeing voting rights for all citizens.  The assassination of President Kennedy in November 1963;  and Fannie Lou Hamer’s unsuccessful but heroic effort to seat black members among the Mississippi delegation at the 1964 Democratic Convention;  each in its own way impelled Congress to act favorably on the vigorous requests from President Johnson.  

 

Additions to Legal Foundation for African American Rights, 1966-1972

 

In the course of the late 1960s, the Johnson administration moved to establish the basis for a Great Society in which poverty would be radically reduced and racism would recede.  Johnson secured passage of legislation to establish the Medicaid program to provide health care for people of low income, and Medicare to take care of the health needs of elderly people.  He oversaw  the provision of food stamps to people of low income for the purpose of purchasing nutritious food;  additionally, the program for Women, Infants, and Children (W. I. C.)  provided milk and other items vital to the health of pregnant women, infants, and young children.

 

Fair housing laws also went into effect, making residentially accessible areas in cities that had previously operated under restrictive housing covenants denying home purchases to people of certain national origins and races.  And the Johnson administration founded the Job Corps to provide training

in work skills to people of low income.  Johnson had won decisively against republican Barry Goldwater in 1964 but took stock of his political situation in the context of an increasingly unpopular Vietnam War and declined to run for president in 1968.  Action to found social programs ebbed during the years of the President Richard M. Nixon administration, but in 1972 a Democratic-controlled Congress to enact the Equal Employment  Opportunity (EEO) Act and the Equal Opportunity Act, the “affirmative action bills” that had the effect of vigorously promoting job and higher educational opportunity for all United States citizens.  The affirmative action bills immediately resulted in the appearance of many more women and people of color in the companies and colleges of the United States, and many more at the head of their own business establishments.

 

In the course of the 1960s and into the early 1970s, there came a voluble call for the assertion of Black Power.  Out of the mouths and in the action of some African Americans this was a testimony  of strength and solidarity that resonated with the call of the Godfather of Soul, James Brown to ,”Say it aloud:  I’m black and I’m proud.”  For others such as Stokely Carmichael (later known as Kwame Toure) as head of CORE; and Bobby Seal, Huey Newton, and Eldridge Cleaver of the Black Panthers;  the assertion of Black Power came with a suggestion of violent means for establishing African American control over  both established institutions and new, revolutionary organizations.  This attitude had been present in the movement of the Nation of Islam (Black Muslims) whose demonstrations and promulgations in the early and middle 1960s had added to the political and social pressures that culminated in passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act and the 1965 Voting Rights Act.  Malcolm X, after a pilgrimage to Mecca that turned him away from extreme racial antipathy for white people and toward a more conventional form of Islam, formed the Organization of Afro-American Unity that nevertheless also held out the possible use of violence under an “any means necessary” assertion of African American rights. 

 

The Black Power Movement coincided with the Black Arts Movement, a leading articulator of  which was Imamu Amiri Baraka, the name taken by the poet and essayist who was born Leroi Jones.  Through the media of his several volumes of poetry, numerous essays, and plays staged in Berlin, Dakar, Paris, and the United States (his drama, Dutchman, was an Obie Award winner in 1964), Baraka became a leading proponent of Black Nationalism and Afro-Islamic culture.   

 

The assassinations of Malcolm X (1965) and Martin Luther King (1968) seemed to energize the Black Power Movement.  But by 1972, the energy of the movement had lost fervor.  Conservative America seemed resurgent in the victory of Richard Nixon over George McGovern in the 1972 presidential contest.  The shooting and death of Chicago Black Panther leader Fred Hampton in his own apartment at the hands of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) came at a time when the Black Panther organization was suffering from internal contentiousness and strain.  Gains had been made and would be forthcoming in the political halls of the establishment and in community organizations for addressing the practical needs of people;  African Americans Shirley Chisolm, Jessie Jackson, Carl Stokes, Thomas Bradley, Maynard Jackson, and Andrew Young would all rise to prominence in such mainstream political and social contexts.

 

But the advocacy for revolutionary change had waned by 1972, and year ahead, despite the advances for the African American middle class and establishment figures had left an angry and restive contingent of people still languishing in poverty, violence, and desperation at the urban core, the inner cities of the United States. 

 

A Time of Unfulfilled Expectations, 1973-1992

 

People in the United States were in the doldrums for much of the 1970s.  The oil crisis hit during 1973-1974, Richard Nixon resigned in 1974 in the aftermath of the Watergate scandal, the Vietnam War came to an ignominious conclusion in 1975, stagflation hit the economy by the middle years of the decade, and Iranians seized American hostages in 1979.  The gains for women and people of color in the halls of business, higher education, and political representation were palpable.  But the gains realized as a result of legislation of the 1960s and early 1970s seemed to take the nation only so far, stalling at the attempt to secure an Equal Rights Amendment;  and leaving the underclass of the central city mired in poverty, ill-educated, and susceptible to all manner of pressures impinging on family and community.

 

In the 1980s those pressures impinged with a vengeance.  Crack cocaine hit the streets about 1980, moving profitability of the drug from the noses of the mostly white wealthy to the pipes of the mostly black poor.  Into this market swept gangs, oftentimes moving into previously unoccupied or lightly-trod areas such as Denver, Omaha, Kansas City, Des Moines, and Minneapolis.  As the white and black middleclass moved to the suburbs, those left behind included the mostly African American poor, the residentially mobile, the recent migrant who knew little about the heritage of the community to which she and he sought more tolerable terms of existence.  School systems that had seemed acceptable when serving substantially middle class populations were now exposed as terrible, particularly in meeting the needs of highly challenged populations.

 

Ronald Reagan won the presidency in 1980 and again in 1984;  his vice-president George H. W. Bush won in 1988.  Jessie Jackson, who headed Operation Breadbasket and the Rainbow Coalition, exerted a forceful presence as a candidate in the Democratic primaries and caucuses in 1984 and 1988, giving voice to the concerns of the underclass, especially those of his fellow African Americans.  But this was mere counterpoint to Reagan’s talk of “welfare queens” who drove Cadillacs and to the policy stupor of the Bush term, 1988-1992.  These were not people to whom African Americans at the urban core could relate, and there was a distinct feeling that both their own leaders and those of white society were failing them, bringing little in the way of new ideas to the table that could address the degrade, violent, and ever-worsening conditions of their own lives.   

 

Democrats seemed more benign but no more effective.  Long after the Great Society programs screamed out for reevaluation, Democrats stood by Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC) that helped families get by but did little to show a way for extraction from the conditions of poverty;  furthermore, because income ceilings were pierced when an acknowledged male income was included in the familial coffers, an unfortunate effect of AFDC was often to drive fathers away from the family or to encourage nondurable and exploitative relationships with males who took much but gave little to a household.

 

By 1992, then, there were two Americas.  Some people characterized these in terms of black and white, but the much greater distinction was between the middle class and the underclass.  Many African American people, as was the case with women of all races, were becoming people of considerable economic means, rising to assume the leadership of major corporations and taking positions in law firms as attorneys and in hospitals and clinics as physicians.  But the contrast with African Americans at the urban core, joined there by other impoverished people of color and by poor whites, was extreme.  The problem ached for a solution;   that solution never came, but the rise of a  politician who talked in cadences that resonated with African American people and delivered a message that at least seemed to convey a caring disposition did make possible of the vision of a more hopeful future for African American people and others living in the inner city.

 

A Time of Greater Hope , 1992-2015

 

The leader with the more amenable cadences and hopeful vision was William Jefferson (Bill) Clinton, who defeated George H. W. Bush in 1992 and won reelection (against Republican nominee Robert Dole) in 1996.  Clinton caught the economy rising on a tide of technological innovation and did much to abet a favorable trend.  He negotiated a responsible budget deal with Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich in 1994 and actually produced a balanced budget in 1996.  Clinton firmly supported the key entitlement programs of Social Security, Medicare, and Medicare, which got consistent COLA (Cost of Living Adjustment) boosts;  and he prevailed upon Congress to expand the Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC) for the working poor.  But Clinton also made strategic budgetary cuts and streamlined the governmental bureaucracy. 

 

And Clinton made a significant change in the character of welfare.  Clinton superintended, and cooperated with Republicans in Congress on, the termination of AFDC in favor of a new program, Temporary Assistance to Needy Families (TANF).  This program put a five year time-limit on the receipt of welfare payments, inducing women who had stayed at home to seek additional education and employment for the long-term support of their families.  The goal was to move the key welfare delivery system from long-term assistance that could be a dependent way of life, toward a system that encouraged work and sought to end cycles of poverty.

 

In the context of expansion of EIC, a booming economy in which people of all economic classes were faring better, an unprecedented number of appointments of African Americans to federal government positions of both greater and lesser status, and the image of a president who spoke a language that radiated warmth and concern---  welfare reform moved through Congress and came law without very much opposition from  the people of the inner city most affected by the dramatic change.

 

George W. Bush was hit with the bombing of the World Trade Center Twin Towers in 2001, making the response to terrorism the chief focus of his presidency, which he gained with victory in 2000 over Democratic candidate Al Gore and again in 2004, this time of over Democratic nominee John Kerry.  The Bush response to terrorism led him to make troop commitments in Iraq and

Afghanistan that were costly and produced very slim results at a huge cost of lives.  Bush did, though, superintend one promising initiative, the No Child Left Behind (NCLB) Program that promoted the disaggregation of data to determine educational outcomes for a bevy of demographic categories, including those pertinent to ethnicity and economic status.  But the program was eventually undermined by forces of both the Democratic left and the Republican right, entailing a catering to teachers unions in the former case and a retreat to rhetoric advocating local control in the latter.

 

In 2008 came the striking event of the election of the first African American president and the entry into the residential halls of the White House an African American family.  Barack Obama achieved a formidable task in significantly altering the nation’s health care system, securing passage of the Affordable Health Care Act.  This law most notably made denial of health care insurance coverage for previously existing conditions illegal;  established insurance exchanges (to be run by states or, upon the inaction of a state, by the federal government) at which consumers could select insurance plans and companies, with costs on a sliding scale according to economic means;  expanding coverage for offspring to the age of 25;  raising the income limitations and therefore expanding coverage under Medicaid;  and establishing penalties for not having insurance.  The expansion of Medicaid and the elimination of coverage denial for preexisting conditions especially helped African Americans of the impoverished inner city, so that the terms and availability of health coverage for blacks and others living at the urban core improved.

 

Obama’s foreign policy has been conducted with the expressed goals of extracting troops from Iraq and Afghanistan.  This has been done in Iraq, with mixed results and calls in many quarters for reentry to stabilize the nation amidst sectarian Sunni-Shi’ite division and the regional threat of the ISIL (Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant, also known as ISIS [Islamic State of Iraq and Syria]).  And in Afghanistan, the central government seems inept in formulating a plan for quelling the threat from the Taliban, so that some presence of United States troops and advisers seems likely.  But Obama has maintained considerable focus on domestic policy even amidst grave foreign policy concerns, thereby leaving a domestic policy legacy that George Bush cannot claim. 

 

Obama’s education initiative, Race to the Top, gained priority over the eviscerated No Child Left Behind Program , offering waivers from NCLB requirement to states that could gain approval for alternative programs for the achievement of educational equity.  None of these, though, have yet had the projected favorable impact, and education in the K-12 systems of the inner city is still as wretched as it has been for at least 35 years.

 

But Barack Obama, with a redefinition of marriage that includes same-sex unions, an immigration policy that offers a route to citizenship to the children of illegal immigrants, and the appointment of many African Americans and other people of color to both major and minor government posts---  communicates a spirit of cultural inclusion that has captured the affective support of most African American people.  And for African Americans, the symbolism of seeing someone at the pinnacle of power whose looks are recognizably those of their own ethnicity is huge and a historical occurrence with permanently favorable prospects.