Cumming v. Richmond County Board of Education
Topic: Jim Crow Cases
[1899] The first court case to apply the separate-but-equal doctrine to education. It involved Richmond County, Georgia, which maintained only a white high school, claiming that it could not afford to operate both a black and white school. A unanimous Supreme Court ruled that the county had little choice but to provide only one school in view of its finances because the alternative would be no school at all for anyone. No black students would benefit by such an action. Speaking for the majority, Justice John Marshall Harlan, the lone dissenter in Plessy v. Ferguson, made it clear that separation would be the ruling order of the day and would be allowed over the imposition of the equality principal in such cases.

United States v. Cruikshank
Topic: Jim Crow Cases
(1876) This case arose out of the bloody Colfax, Louisiana, riot on Easter Sunday, 1873, in which 280 African Americans were massacred. Federal prosecutors indicted scores of whites under the Civil Rights Enforcement Act of 1870 (see Enforcement Acts). In a staggering blow to the power of the federal government to protect the civil rights of blacks, the Court quashed the indictments on the grounds that they had failed to clearly indicate the racial intentions of the arrested whites to deprive blacks of their civil rights. Justice Joseph P. Bradley, in writing for the majority, stated that the Fourteenth Amendment authorized federal action against state laws that denied rights but did not permit federal action against the actions of private individuals. He also wrote that while the Thirteenth and Fifteenth Amendments did allow federal action to prevent the private denial of rights, they did so only on the specified basis of race, color, or previous conditions of servitude. This ruling along with the ruling in U.S. v. Reese, gave primary authority to the states in matters of civil rights.

United States v. Reese
Topic: Jim Crow Cases
(1876) In this case the Supreme Court ruled as unconstitutional an Alabama law providing that a convict who was unable to pay his fine and court costs could be confined to hard labor on a chain gang. The law also said that such convicted persons could be released into the custody of someone who paid the convict's debt. The Court found that typically the convict was usually black and ended up working a period of time far exceeding the original sentence. The law also provided that if the convict broke his contract with the person paying his debt, he could be imprisoned again with an enhanced fine. Then a second person could pay the fine and work the convict for an even longer term. The Court had no problem with the idea of convicts contracting to pay their debt to the state by working off their fines paid by a second part. This was simple freedom of contract. But the Court found that in fact this chain gang labor was tantamount to slavery because the worker had no freedom to break his contract and return to jail if he so desired. The Court ruled that this arrangement violated the Thirteenth Amendment prohibition against involuntary servitude and federal statutes prohibiting peonage.

Slaughterhouse Cases
Topic: Jim Crow Cases
[1873] This is the first Supreme Court decision that began a series of narrow interpretations of the Fourteenth Amendment. This ruling left little opportunity for the federal government to use the Amendment to protect the Civil Rights of African Americans. The case had nothing to do with blacks or with civil rights in its origin. It began when butchers in New Orleans challenged a state-granted monopoly on the slaughtering of cattle in the city. They argued that section one of the Fourteenth Amendment protected their property rights as well as their rights to due process and equal protection under the law. The Court ruled in favor of the state saying that the Fourteenth Amendment prohibited only state law that discriminated against blacks as a class. This meant that the Supreme Court rejected the idea that it could review state legislation which any one person might feel had deprived him/her of basic rights. It argued that the Court could only review state legislation that abridged the rights of national citizenship. Other rights, such as the right to labor or the regulation of corporations were left up to the states to handle.

Red Summer of 1917
Topic: Jim Crow
The NAACP staged a silent protest rally against lynching. Nearly fifteen thousand African-Americans marched down Manhattan's Fifth Avenue demonstrating their support for a government stoppage of lynching, race riots, and the denial of rights.

A post reconstruction fact; these murders were ongoing in the last decades of the nineteenth century and the beginning decades of the twentieth century. The lynching of Black people in the Southern and Border States became an institutionalized method used by whites to terrorize African-Americans and maintain white supremacy. Mainly in the South, during the period 1880 to 1940, there was deep-seated and all-pervading hatred and fear of the Negro which led white mobs to turn to ?lynch law? as a means of social control. Lynching, open public murders of individuals suspected of crime conceived and carried out spontaneously by a mob seem to have been an American invention.

Most of the lynching was by hanging or shooting, or both. However, many were of a more hideous nature, burning at the stake, maiming, dismemberment, castration, and other brutal methods of physical torture. Lynching was a cruel combination of racism and sadism, which was utilized primarily to sustain the caste system in the South. Many white people believed that Negroes could only be controlled by fear. To them, lynching was seen as the most effective means of control. Before 1882, no reliable statistics of lynching were recorded. In that year, the Chicago Tribune first began to take systematic account of lynching. Shortly thereafter, in 1892, Tuskegee Institute began to make a systematic collection and tabulation of lynching statistics.

Beginning in 1912, the NAACP kept an independent record of lynching. These statistics were based primarily on newspaper reports. Because the South is so large and the rural districts had not always been in close contact with the city newspapers, it is certain that many lynching escaped publicity in the press. The largest number of lynching occurred in 1892 with 230 persons lynched that year.

In 1919, termed the ?Red Summer of Hate,? over one hundred blacks were lynched as the Ku Klux Klan held more than two hundred meetings throughout the country to launch arbitrary lynching, shootings, and other acts of violence against black people. Many of these were World War I veterans and mobs even burned eleven men at the stake. Race riots occurred in twenty-five cities from April to early October 1919.

The largest took place in Chicago, where thirty-eight people of both races died and five hundred were injured. Other serious confrontations happened in Elaine, Arkansas, Charleston, South Carolina, Knoxville, Tennessee, Longview, Texas, Omaha, Nebraska, and Washington, D.C. Undoubtedly, there are errors and inaccuracies in the available lynching statistics. According to the Tuskegee Institute figures, between the years 1882 and 1951, 4,730 people were lynched in the United States. Several factors let to the violence.

A growing number of blacks were pitted against whites in obtaining jobs and housing in northern cities. Blacks had more aspirations of political power and wealth mainly due to their current generation having been born after emancipation. Those returning from the war in particular believed that they would be rewarded for their efforts in defeating Germany, but these hopes were (in general) not realized. The country wanted to keep blacks down at the bottom of the social, political, and economic ladder.

Never before had retaliatory violence been so widespread. Some suggested that a ?New Negro? was emerging; one who would retaliate if attacked. These circumstances were compounded by the prevailing mistrust in postwar America of all things ?alien,? including blacks. The ?red Scare? translated into beatings of those foreign born, mass arrests of radicals, and raids on left-wing organizations.

Sam Hose
Topic: Jim Crow

Sam Hose was an African American worker who was lynched in Newnan, Georgia on April 23, 1899, in front of 2,000 white people, many of whom had travelled to Newnan from Atlanta for the occasion. Hose was accused of murdering his employer, Albert Cranford, over a wage dispute. Hose killed Cranford, who had pulled a revolver on Hose. Hose killed Cranford with anax. Cranford`s wife accused Hose of raping her as her husband lay dying. Hose`s lynching was well advertised ahead of time in newspapers, including the Atlanta Constitution-Journal, which implied Hose would be tortured prior to his lynching. Sam Hose`s corpse was mutilated and dismembered (his ears, genitals, and fingers were cut off, and his face skinned). His body was then tied to a tree and set on fire, and parts of him were taken as souvenirs by onlookers.

Passing For White in Jim Crow America
Topic: Jim Crow
When southern legislators wrote into law the separation of the races in their regions, they set into motion an array of socioeconomic, political, ideological, and personal phenomena. These laws, their philosophical foundations and tangible effects, dramatically shaped every aspect of life in the post-Civil War South. Southern whites used a powerful combination of economic control, political domination, criminal justice administration, and mob violence to assert their supremacy. The social system they fastened upon the land defined privilege, citizenship, and freedom by one's whiteness. It made virtually impossible the ability to assume an identity that did not comply with the binary racial system that white southerners established and defended.

To the South's African-American citizens, Jim Crow laws clearly rang. "Colored" persons, presumed to be physically identifiable and behaviorally distinct, were excluded from virtually all public accommodations, including hotels, libraries, theaters, public parks, and swimming pools. This exclusion marked black men and women as subordinate human beings, whose presence within the white world should never threaten white authority, and reinforced African Americans' caste status.

Furthermore, African Americans' access to education, housing, and health care was limited, too, by potent obstacles to the ballot and, ultimately, by the Supreme Court's decision in Plessy v. Ferguson, which upheld the legality of the "separate but equal" doctrine. Segregated within or excluded from the white world, African Americans persisted in carving out their own communities, resisting whites' encroaching authority, and maintaining their own dignity and humanity.

The Jim Crow state not only forced black women and men into semiautonomous and defiant communities, it also fixed the boundaries around privilege and citizenship. The abilities and rights to vote, to provide one's children with a suitable education, to live in a paved and electrified neighborhood, to drink clean water from a clean facility, to check out a book from a lending library, to obtain a fair trial, and to ally one's self, psychologically, with the ruling body, these were unquestionably tied to one's whiteness.

Throughout the antebellum and postbellum periods, ethnic immigrants assimilated into the "white" population, hence benefiting from their "not black" status. In the slowly urbanizing South delineated by "colored" and "white" signs in public places, those with "white" appearances enjoyed the socially significant privilege of walking, sitting, eating, worshiping, and relaxing where they wished. The rewards of whiteness were plentiful, not only to those whose families had long resided in the nation, but also to those who were able to assimilate into the "white" category.

But, in writing the laws that protected white status and in dividing the public sphere into "colored" and "white" spaces, white legislators and citizens overlooked the large body of persons of mixed race, who presented many challenges to southern ideologues. Realizing that there were "white Negroes" in their midst and fearing that they would somehow slip into and poison the white world and bloodlines, white lawmakers began categorizing measurements of blood and defining the races accordingly.

Twentieth-century society proved to have little or no room for what was, in the antebellum period, a three-tiered social structure, with mixed-race free persons inhabiting a tenuous but real middle position. Thus, the descendants of the South's antebellum class of racially blended, freeborn, and socially entitled free persons of color were made "colored" throughout the southern states. In some places, they were "colored" if they carried 1/32nd percent "African blood;" in others, 1/16th or 1/8th. In still other contexts, persons of mixed race were considered "colored" if they were discernibly "dark" to the white eye.

While lawmakers legislated ancestry and categorized blood to more carefully clarify and carry out Jim Crow laws (particularly those of inheritance and marriage), persons of mixed race were faced with a quandary of their own. Given that many persons of mixed race had enjoyed a middle position with some privileges and had, for many generations, defined themselves according to their status as free and partially white, segregation laws forced a whole population into an unfamiliar position. Witnessing and often experiencing the poverty that black people braved and watching as southern whites erected the emblems--particularly "white" and "colored" labels that invariably represented superior and inferior facilities--of Jim Crow, persons of mixed race recognized the options available to them.

Many joined forces with other persons designated as "colored" and agitated for equal access and equal rights. Accepting the race label assigned to them, these persons often took leading roles in African-American political organizations. Others attempted, sometimes successfully, to maintain their "in-between" positions. Forming closed societies--tight-knit communities in which all the members shared the same ancestry, physical characteristics, and culture--they often rejected altogether racial designations that made their mixture an impossibility.

Still, most people of mixed race lived and worked in a world dominated and delineated by whites. Despite their separatist attitudes and actions, they interacted with whites in the public world. Many recognized that, while the law made them "colored," their appearances often told another story. Seeing that segregation was essentially a dividing of persons by physical appearance, many of those with "white" appearances blended into the white world. This phenomenon is often called "going to the other side," "crossing over," or "passing." Not coincidental are the colloquialisms used to describe those who sought to reap the benefits of whiteness, for this often led to a kind of social death. Depending on the degree to which a person passed--from sitting in the white section of a theater to working in an exclusively white occupation to completely altering one's identity-- a person passing necessarily separated from his/her family and peers. For instance, people passing for white in the public realm often had to ignore darker-skinned or black friends and family as they walked by on the sidewalk. It also sometimes meant moving into a neighborhood where one's friends and family would be conspicuous to the white eye. Often, it entailed altering one's legal status or that of one's children.

For many, it meant leaving the city, state, or region and losing communication with peers and siblings. Considering the maneuverings and risks that racial passing required, it is understandable that many did not think it was worth the trouble. Nevertheless, "passing" proved a useful tool to many persons of mixed race whose appearances were "white" or ambiguous enough to get away with it.

Some people, perhaps most, deliberately masqueraded as white or allowed themselves to be taken for white when applying for work. Because segregation affected the workplace--designating some jobs as "white" and others as "colored"--and because persons in "white jobs" invariably earned greater incomes than those in "colored" ones, people who "looked" white often accepted these positions. Working as whites, they most definitely earned greater incomes, even in blue-collar trades. Greater incomes enabled them to send their children to a private school or to college, to own rather than rent their homes, to purchase the badges of middle class sensibility, or to migrate to areas that offered greater opportunities.

Working as white is one example of how passing represented a form of resistance to Jim Crow's conditions. Some not only passed for white to earn a better living, they also used their appearances to enjoy facilities available only to "whites." Thus, persons of mixed race not only sat comfortably on streetcars or listened to operas and symphonies, they also resisted those local laws and customs that labeled them black, hence undeserving of these diversions. Able to pass the so-called "eye test," these persons illustrate their determination to maintain their humanity, even if it meant risking their safety for a simple meal at a lunch counter.

However, working as a white person also entailed many risks. While most people assumed that a white person would not "accuse them of really being colored" because doing so would embarrass the accuser if he or she were wrong, many worried, nonetheless, that a white person would challenge their status. Another risk discouraging many from passing was the possibility of being "outed" by a person of color who witnessed someone masquerading as a white man or woman. Perhaps, the greatest risk was the damaging effect that passing had on the family. When people chose to work as white or attend white churches or take classes at white colleges, they made an ancillary choice to treat their brown-skinned loved ones as strangers or to cut ties to life-long friends. While some persons respected their siblings' or friends' choices and the underlying motivation, they also recognized the losses all parties experienced.

For those with the greatest nerve, or perhaps the greatest investment in their whiteness, the possibility of altering one's legal status remained. Again, this involved great risk. Persons of mixed race recognized that, in some cases, a "white" appearance was enough to garner them the rewards they sought; in other cases, official proof of one's race was necessary. Birth certificates, social security cards, drivers' licenses, induction papers, and baptism and marriage records required that they confirm of their racial status. By obtaining these records and falsifying them (depending upon the definition of "colored" in a locale), some persons secured their status and the economic, political, and psychological amenities it promised.

Ultimately, passing embodied a survival strategy at a time when the South, especially, lagged behind the nation in economic, educational, and health conditions. Segregation meant that, even in the largely rural and impoverished South, those who were "white" earned higher salaries, were given raises and promotions, enjoyed seniority; those who were "white" were better educated and sent their children to state-funded schools, which prepared "white" children for skilled or professional occupations; and those who were "white" enjoyed access to hospitals, clinics, and pharmacies, practically guaranteeing better health. One's ability to mask, particularly during the Great Depression, offered the poor and destitute a chance to earn a little more money, to accept a job earmarked for a white person, or to share resources with the larger "colored" community. Whiteness carried with it many advantages, and persons who could slip across the color line often did so to benefit themselves and others.

Although the literature on race, constructions of race, and racial transgression is growing at a rapid and encouraging rate, there is still a culture of apology and secrecy around passing, as illustrated by the pseudonymous woman in narrative 5. One informant referred to this culture as "the code" that one should not break--even in the present day from which Jim Crow's specter is fading, the identity of those who passed (and continue to pass) should not be revealed. This secrecy, represented in the lack of photographs of those telling their stories and the altering of their names, is one legacy of Jim Crow identity politics that continues to this day.

Escaping Jim Crow
Topic: Jim Crow
On a day-to-day level, many southern blacks resisted Jim Crow by hoping for the day when they could escape the Jim Crow South--much as their ancestors had used the Underground Railroad to escape slavery by going to the North. Thousands of blacks had indeed left for Kansas and Oklahoma in the 1880s and the 1890s. The movement to Kansas became known as the "Kansas Exodus," and even today there exist several nearly all-black towns in the state. Thousands of other black sharecroppers moved to southern towns and cities in the 1880s and 1890s. Some African Americans even tried to establish all-black towns within the South, like Mound Bayou in the Mississippi delta, in hopes of completely isolating themselves from whites altogether while staying in the region of their births. But the vast majority of black migrants from the South traveled to eastern and mid-western cities and towns, beginning in the 1890s. In a three-year span from 1916 to 1919, in what has been called the "Great Migration," over half a million blacks fled the South. Another million left in the 1920s. During the Great Depression, when black sharecroppers were turned off the land, thousands of them joined relatives and friends in Chicago, Detroit, Pittsburgh, New York, and Los Angeles.

Many of these black migrants were pushed out of the South by a series of natural disasters, such as floods and the boll weevil scourge which devastated cotton crops from Texas to Georgia. Other were pulled to the North by the opportunity for jobs created by the labor shortage during World War One and the cut-off of European immigration to the U. S. in the 1920s. But it was also the years of pent up anger and smoldering rage that propelled southern blacks to leave the land of Jim Crown laws and lynchings at their first opportunity. Although escaping to northern and midwestern cities did bring an end to the most overt forms of Jim Crow for southern blacks, the North was not a "promised land," one completely free of racial strife. Many white city dwellers bitterly resented the influx of blacks, and violent race riots erupted all over the nation from 1890 to 1945. Major ones occurred in East St. Louis, Houston, Chicago, and Tulsa in the years 1917 through 1921. In nearly every case black people defended themselves and their families against roving mobs of white racists.

In the cities of the North, the NAACP and the National Urban League, both interracial groups, worked to integrate blacks into the economic mainstream of American life. A third organization, the largest mass movement among blacks prior to the Civil Rights Movement of the 1950s and 1960s, the Universal Negro Improvement Association and African Communities League, was less concerned with integration than with economic development. An admirer of Booker T. Washington, the UNIA founder, Marcus Garvey, advocated self-help and black autonomy over integration. He also launched a movement to send blacks to Africa that attracted the interest of thousands of African Americans, including many who had moved to Oklahoma and Kansas in the 1880s and 1890s.

Much of the desire to flee the South and to resist segregation legally and politically had resulted from the experience of African-American soldiers in World War I. Young black soldiers home from Europe found Jim Crow especially grueling, and many of them joined their neighbors and relatives who had moved to northern cities during and before the war, enticed by jobs in the war industries. A similar pattern occurred after World War II, when over a million and a half African Americans left the South for eastern and midwestern cities and the west coast.

Most importantly, black Americans in the 1940s refused to accept a segregated military or lack of access by blacks to employment in the war industries. The African-American leader A. Philip Randolph threatened in 1941 to lead 50,000 blacks in a non-violent "March on Washington D.C." to secure fair employment in the war industries. President Franklin Roosevelt responded by opening the defense industries to equal employment, monitored by the Fair Employment Practices Agency. Northern blacks were attracted to the Democratic Party in the 1930s and 1940s because of FDR's support for labor, the various welfare benefit programs that aided impoverished blacks, and Eleanor Roosevelt's advocacy for civil rights. This switch in political parties represented a monumental shift from the party of Lincoln to the party of FDR, and it laid the political ground for challenging Jim Crow in the 1950s.

Resisting Jim Crow
Topic: Jim Crow
For most southern blacks, Jim Crow was not an easy or acceptable condition for them to tolerate, nor was it always possible for them to avoid whites. For thousands and indeed tens of thousands of African Americans, Jim Crow was met with resistance and determination to win back the civil rights that had been stolen from them after 1876. Often this resistance took the form of individual acts of defiance, and often it took the form of organized challenges. It is impossible to know, for example, how many of the nearly 4,000 (recorded) African Americans lynched (mutilated and burned alive) from 1882 to 1968, were men and women who had challenged Jim Crow by some overt act of defiance. Studies by Ida B. Wells-Barnett, the great anti-lynching crusader in the early twentieth-century, suggest that most of the lynch victims were random subjects of white rage. Clearly this was the case in the bloody urban riots in which mobs of whites swooped down on black neighborhoods, burning and killing any blacks who crossed their enraged paths. Numerous victims were lynched on trumped up charges, such as the case depicted in Harper Lee's novel, To Kill A Mockingbird.

It seems quite likely, however, that many of the black victims of mob violence had affronted whites by some form of unacceptable behavior that possibly included acts of defiance. One such case involved Ida B. Wells-Barnett's murdered friends in Memphis, whose only crime was that of owning a prosperous grocery store. Almost all blacks knew that to stand out in anyway as anything but a shuffling "darkey" amounted to an attack on white supremacy. That is why even some prosperous blacks in some communities lived in unpainted houses, owned run-down and unpainted stores and businesses, and avoided new carriages and automobiles. More than a few black newspapers editors, church leaders, and civil rights' advocates narrowly escaped the lynch mobs, whose members wanted them dead because of their outspoken defiance of Jim Crow. Ida B. Wells-Barnett had to flee Memphis, for example, because she dared to speak out in condemnation of the murders. How many others of the lynched were men and women like Wells-Barnett will probably never be known.

By 1905, the issue of how to most effectively deal with Jim Crow came to a head in the debate between the followers of Booker T. Washington and W.E.B. Du Bois. Washington, who was born in slavery, believed that accepting segregation for the time being and working hard at farming and in community-based support groups would best enable southern blacks to avoid the violence and terror all around them. He supported and helped found schools and colleges (Tuskegee Institute), often funded by white philanthropists, which educated blacks in agriculture and trained black vocational teachers. Such tactics, Washington argued, would in time bring a measure of economic security and eventually a middle-class basis for challenging disfranchisement and the terror of Jim Crow.

William Edward Burghardt Du Bois, on the other hand, a Harvard-educated, New England-born intellectual, found Washington's appeasement strategy of dealing with whites unacceptable. Although he clearly understood that blacks were powerless to end segregation immediately, he strongly believed that African Americans should insist upon all their Constitutional rights as American citizens. He advocated efforts, among other things, to educate a talented elite of black Americans to lead the masses in political and economic resistance to Jim Crow.

Du Bois broke openly with Washington in 1903, with the publication of his book, The Souls of Black Folk, which included an essay highly critical of Washington. The split became nearly irreparable when he founded, along with William Monroe Trotter (a long-time and vehement critic of Washington) the Niagara Movement, which advocated vigilant protest and activism in place of Washington's gradualism and appeasement. Although the Niagara movement floundered within a few years, it helped set the stage for the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), an interracial organization that emerged in 1909/1910, and became the principal voice advocating legal resistance to segregation, disfranchisement, and lynching in the nation. In the 1920s, it conducted scores of lawsuits at the local level in defense of black civil liberties and civil rights, and it also lobbied Congress to pass a federal anti-lynching bill. Although it never achieved a federal anti-lynching law, its constant vigilance and exposure of lynching helped to greatly reduce the number of incidents by 1940.

In the 1930s, the NAACP, under its leader Walter White and the head of its legal department, Charles Hamilton Houston, began to focus more of its attention on a campaign to challenge segregation and disfranchisement in the United States Supreme Court. Ultimately, the Association's constant agitation, unstinting legal investigations, and numerous court litigations at all levels of the legal system resulted in the overthrowing of segregation in public schools in 1954 by the Supreme Court in the landmark case of Brown v. the Topeka Board of Education. This decision not only reversed the Court's support for the "separate but equal" doctrine, it also opened the floodgates through which a sea of civil rights litigation and legislation flowed over the nation in the 1950s and 1960s.

Joining with the NAACP in contesting Jim Crow in the 1920s and 1930s were an array of political organizations like the National Urban League, the National Negro Congress, and more radical groups such as the Communist Party. In the latter case, the Communist Party gained significant support in the black community for its energetic defense in the 1930s of the Scottsboro Boys by the party's League of Struggle for Negro Rights. This case, which involved the trumped up convictions of nine black youths falsely accused of assaulting two white women, attracted many unemployed workers to the party in the 1930s. Some rural African Americans also joined the socialist backed Southern Tenant Farmers' Union in the 1930s in defense of their economic rights in the plantation districts of the South.

In addition to the organized, political, and personal resistance to Jim Crow, African Americans attacked white supremacy in non-political but defiant cultural expressions. The new musical forms of ragtime and jazz, presented an in-your-face side of black culture that had grown up largely in the shadow of segregation and Jim Crow. The distinctive richness of jazz syncopation and its adaptation of African and plantation-based rhythms to European harmony defied white expectations and the stereotypes presented in the so-called "coon songs" of the Jim Crow minstrel shows. Both musical forms expressed the joyful exuberance of a complex and sophisticated black culture based in the urban centers, especially New Orleans, of the American South.

The rural-based blues music of the Yazoo and Texas deltas spoke more of coping with misery and the "low-down and dirty" side of living as penniless sharecroppers and field hands in the Jim Crow South. The message presented by blues singers in hundreds of southern "juke joints" was one of desperation, anguish, and perseverance--of a "lowdown achin' heart disease, like consumption, killin' by degrees." They sang of a pervasive sadness that was always present: "I've got the blues before sunrise, with the tears standing in my eyes, ..." At the same time, the blues also celebrated the human joys of the black community, including love, sexual desire, and heroic actions in the midst of hard times.

Along side the blues and jazz, a tradition of black protest literature also shouted loudly in defiance of white supremacy. This literary movement of resistance had begun in the previous century but reached its fullest expression in the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s. Based in Harlem, New York, which was the "New World" (along with Chicago) for thousands of black migrants from the South, the Renaissance featured a "New Negro" poetry and literature that emphasized self-respect and defiance. Its greatest artists explicitly expressed the deepest feelings of African Americans about racism, segregation, and discrimination. The essays, poems, and novels of the Harlem Renaissance rejected sentimentality, romanticism, and escapism to focus directly on the root causes of the crippling plight of black America: white racism.

Surviving Jim Crow
Topic: Jim Crow
The Supreme Court's sanctioning of segregation (by upholding the "separate but equal" language in state laws) in the Plessy v. Ferguson case in 1896 and the refusal of the federal government to enact anti-lynching laws meant that black Americans were left to their own devices for surviving Jim Crow. In most cases, southern blacks tried to avoid engaging whites as much as possible as the best means of avoiding their wrath. These efforts at avoiding whites meant supporting their own schools and community-based support groups as much as possible.

In the 1860s and early 1870s, many southern blacks actually preferred segregated schools, especially their all-black colleges, as a means of local autonomy and independence--even though they had little choice in the matter after 1890. Many of these colleges became the primary centers of black resistance to Jim Crow, although their administrators and staff frequently differed over how best to make their stand. At the primary and secondary school levels, truly heroic efforts were made by impoverished black teachers to educate their pupils, usually in face of white resistance that often included violence. Whites were generally so opposed to black education that many states in the South refused to build black public high schools until the twentieth-century. Despite the repression, the literacy rate of blacks nearly doubled from 1880 to 1930, rising from less than 45 percent to 77 percent--an incredible climb from the less than 7 percent who were literate in 1865.

Additionally, southern blacks survived the demeaning character of Jim Crow by organizing self-help associations that functioned as parallel institutions to those in the white community, ranging from lodges and social clubs to life insurance programs and volunteer fire departments. By 1910, a wide range of segregated black institutions in southern communities served as refuges and safe harbors from white terror and violence; these social clubs and lodges enabled a small, middle-class of prosperous black participants to live in dignity and with self-respect.

For the vast majority of southern blacks, the terror of Jim Crow meant that they were forced to live" behind the veil," in the words of the black intellectual, W.E.B. Du Bois. In dealing with whites, most southern blacks were forced to adopt accommodationist and appeasement tactics that played out in complicated ways across the region. Scholars refer to these tactics as "dissembling," or a psychological ploy in which blacks assumed positions and the appearances of non-confrontation. Sometimes it meant shuffling and feigning irresponsibility, and sometimes it meant turning the other cheek and walking away. Almost always these appeasement stances meant adhering to a demeaning racial etiquette.

Black customers were almost never served first in stores when white customers were present, seldom allowed to try on clothing in white businesses, and typically forced to wait patiently to be spoken to by white store clerks rather than to dare address them directly. Nor were adult African Americans afforded terms of respect, such as "Mister," "Mrs.," or "Miss." Instead, they endured words such as "boy," "girl," "uncle," "auntie," and often "nigger."

When among themselves, African Americans resisted these insults by mocking whites in song, jokes, and stories. They would even sing these songs of mockery as they worked when whites were present. This reflected a long history of "putting on the man, " or playing Sambo, in order to manipulate white masters and better control the otherwise powerless situation of their lives in slavery. Tragically, many southern whites came to expect this type of docile behavior from all blacks, demanding it during and after slavery under the threat of violence. This Sambo character (an innately barbaric, passive, cheerful, childish, lazy, and submissive black) was commonly accepted as reality in both the southern and northern states.

Over time, this Sambo-type image was immortalized in literature and film of the period, usually in the character of Uncle Tom, Uncle Remus, Jim Crow and "Old Black Joe." D.W. Griffith's classic silent film "The Birth of a Nation," released in 1915, depicts elected black congressmen during Reconstruction as ape-like characters, eating bananas on the floor of Congress. This image was further repeated in white-produced movies with black film actors often cast as a lazy, submissive, and innately docile character who spoke in the same manner as did black slaves when in the presence of their masters or in the company of whites. That is, taking a posture of docility, holding their head down, and smiling all the time with their hat in their hands when talking to whites. In short, African Americans were forced to assume a multitude of personalities in order to cope with Jim Crow.