1. Striving for Equality
Topic 3.3

2. Voting Restrictions
Concerns = too much political power for African Americans if they vote
1890s: voting restrictions emerge
Property requirement, Poll tax, Literacy tests, and Grandfather clauses

3. Segregation De facto Segregation that simply results from tradition.
It exists in fact, but not in law.
African Americans were treated like second class citizens

4. Segregation
De jure
In the south segregation was required by statutes called Jim Crow Laws
Jim Crow laws required segregation in schools, parks, hospitals, theaters, restrooms, other public buildings.
African American facilities were inferior

5. Lynching
The murder of an accused person by a mob w/out a lawful trial.
Sometimes included a mock trial.
Sometimes victims were mutilated before being killed
Estimated 1,200 African Americans were lynched between

6. Northern Migration
Many African Americans moved north-escape violence and legal segregation
De Jure  De Facto
Schools, housing, employment
Job competition in N. cities creates fear. RACE RIOTS!
NYC, 1900
Springfield, Illinois, 1908

7. It becomes LEGAL. Plessy v. Ferguson, 1896
Homer Plessy buys a first-class train ticket from New Orleans. He refuses to sit in the black only car.
He is arrested.
Case reaches the Supreme Court.

8. Plessy Decision
RULING: Segregation is legal as long as the separate facilities were equal to the whites’ facilities.
“Separate but Equal”
The 14th Amendment was “not intended to give social equality but only political and civil equality.”

9. 2 famous African American college graduates:
Booker T. Washington
W.E.B. Du Bois
2 very different perspectives

10. Booker T. Washington Founded Tuskegee Institute (Alabama, 1881) Focus:
Building economic security & vocational skills
Put aside their desire for political equality for now and focus on building economic security by gaining vocational skills
Popular w/ whites

11. Booker T. Washington
“To those of my race who depend on bettering their condition… I would say: ‘Cast down your bucket where you are’ …No race can prosper till it learns that there is as much dignity in tilling a field as in writing a poem”

12. W.E.B. Du Bois Graduated from Fisk University
Became the first African American to earn a Ph.D. from Harvard (1895)
Argued that the brightest African Americans had to step forward to lead
The Talented Tenth
Liberal arts (not vocational)
Quest for political and social equality and civil rights

13. W.E.B. Du Bois In writings such as The Souls of Black Folks
Urged African Americans not to define themselves as whites saw them but to take pride in both their African and African American heritages

14. Niagara Movement-1905 Called for: Led to the formation of NAACP
Du Bois helped found
Met on Canadian side of Niagara Falls
Called for:
Full civil rights
End to racial discrimination
Never to accept “inferiority”
Never to bow to “oppression”
Never to apologize “before insult”
Led to the formation of NAACP

16. NAACP
Founding of the NAACP (National Association for the Advancement of Colored People)
Purpose was to abolish segregation and discrimination, oppose racism, and gain civil rights
By 1914
50 branches w/ 6,000 members
Worked through the court system