Congratulations on finishing the class.A new movement has started since the early 2000s, where some political groups are trying to remove American history from our children's school curriculum and tex
CHAPTER 1 Though Justice Sleeps 1880– 1900 Barbara Bair I n his 1884 book Black and White , African-American journalist and activist T. Thomas Fortune analyzed the denial of justice to African Americans and the process of disenfranchisement that characterized the post-Reconstruction era. He observed that the exclusion of African Americans from land ownership and voting were the twin roots of the “great social wrong which has turned the beautiful roses of freedom into thorns to prick the hands of the black men of the South.” Despite the promises of freedom, including legal emancipation from slavery and postwar talk of righting economic inequities and providing opportunities, the majority of African Americans faced landlessness, underemployment, and lack of access to political rights or protections. Land, as a symbol of freedom and citizenship, and as a means of independent livelihood, was at the crux of African-American desire in the last two decades of the nineteenth century. During this period, nine out of ten of the 6.5 million African Americans in the United States made their homes in the South. Eighty percent of these black Southerners lived in rural areas, and most of them were farmers or agricultural laborers. Some were landowners and had their own small farms, but most were tenants. They rented the land where they worked for cash or a share of the crops they raised. Others worked for hire. It was very difficult for tenant farmers working under sharecropping arrangements to get ahead financially, and having enough to eat and adequate clothing were always worries. Most faced each new year owing money from years before to the white people from whom they rented land and to the merchant who ran the store where they purchased their goods. “We make as much cotton and sugar as we did when we were slaves,” one black tenant farmer in Texas observed, “and it does us as little good now as it did then.” Laborers who questioned the high prices charged to them, which would invariably be set at a rate that would encompass or exceed the value of their entire year’s crop, had little legal recourse. As one black Mississippian testified to the Senate, “Colored men soon learn that it is better to pay any account, however unjust, than to refuse, for he stands no possible chance of getting justice before the law.” Many African-American sharecroppers and farmers sought greater justice by moving to different land. When their contracts were up at one place, they would often pack their belongings and enter into a new arrangement on another tract of acreage, hoping to improve
To Make Our World Anew : A History of African Americans, edited by Robin D. G. Kelley, and Earl Lewis, Oxford University Press, 2014. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/apus/detail.action?docID=679615.
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CHAPTER 2 A Chance to Make Good 1900– 1929 James R. Grossman I n 1900, ninety percent of all African Americans lived in the South; three-fourths of these eight million people inhabited rural communities. The 880,771 black Northerners, on the other hand, were decidedly urban; seventy-one percent lived in cities. History and personal experience taught African Americans that their position in U.S. society could not be understood without understanding racism. But race was not the only basis for discrimination in American life. Nor was it the only way Americans defined themselves. Class and gender, along with religion, ethnicity, and age, also shaped lives, ideas, and dreams. Perhaps, indeed, “the problem of the Twentieth Century is the problem of the color line,” as W. E. B. Du Bois declared in 1903. But the significance and the composition of that line cannot be reduced to the biology of skin pigmentation. The meaning of race, and the practice of racism, were tightly intertwined with labor systems, ideas about family life, and assumptions about the relationship between manhood and citizenship. Du Bois recognized that it was impossible to understand the meaning of race without also understanding class. The place of African Americans in society was inseparable from their place in the economy. In African-American history, images of victimization spring to mind as readily as notions of progress. Hope has most often bred disappointment and frequently disillusionment as well. In the early twentieth century, black Americans shared in the aspirations and expectations of their fellow citizens but did so as a people with a unique history and set of barriers to overcome. African Americans argued among themselves as to what those barriers were made of; exactly where they were situated; how permanent they were; and whether they should be destroyed, circumvented, or hurdled. During the first three decades of the twentieth century, thousands of black men and women obliterated, removed, tiptoed around, climbed over, and even passed through these barriers. Others ignored them. Some resigned themselves to the limitations and pain these barriers produced, without accepting the notion that such obstacles were either natural or just. And still others suffered from the costs of pounding the barriers at times and in places where they were too deeply embedded in the social fabric to be breached. Making a Living At the dawn of the twentieth century the color line, or the separation between whites and
To Make Our World Anew : A History of African Americans, edited by Robin D. G. Kelley, and Earl Lewis, Oxford University Press, 2014. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/apus/detail.action?docID=679615.
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CHAPTER 3 From a Raw Deal to a New Deal? 1929– 1945 Joe William Trotter, Jr . L ong before the stock market crash in October 1929, African Americans had experienced hard times. The “last hired and the first fired,” African Americans entered the Great Depression earlier and more deeply than other racial and ethnic groups. Sociologists St. Clair Drake and Horace R. Cayton believed that the black community served as a “barometer sensitive to the approaching storm.” Months before the stock market crash, the Chicago Defender warned, “Something is happening… and it should no longer go unnoticed. During the past three weeks hardly a day has ended that there has not been a report of another firm discharging its employees, many of whom have been faithful workers at these places for years.” The depression brought mass suffering to the country as a whole. National income dropped by nearly fifty percent, from $81 billion in 1929 to $40 billion in 1932; unemployment rose to an estimated twenty-five percent of the labor force; and nearly twenty million Americans turned to public and private relief agencies to prevent starvation and destitution. Still, African Americans suffered more than their white counterparts, received less from their government, and got what they called a “raw deal” rather than a “new deal.” The depression took its toll on virtually every facet of African American life. As unemployment rose, membership in churches, clubs, and fraternal orders dropped. Blacks frequently related the pain of this separation from friends and acquaintances. “I don’t attend church as often as I used to. You know I am not fixed like I want to be— haven’t got the clothes I need.” Blacks in the rural South faced the most devastating impact of the Great Depression. As cotton prices dropped from eighteen cents per pound to less than six cents by early 1933, an estimated two million black farmers faced hard times. The number of black sharecroppers dropped from nearly 392,000 in 1930 to under 300,000 as the depression spread. All categories of rural black labor— landowners, cash tenants, sharecroppers, and wage laborers —suffered from declining incomes. Mechanical devices had already reduced the number of workers needed for plowing, hoeing, and weeding, but planters now experimented with mechanical cotton pickers as well. As one black woman put it, many jobs had “gone to machines, gone to white people or gone out of style.” Public and private relief efforts were virtually nonexistent in the rural South, forcing farm families to continue their trek to the city.
To Make Our World Anew : A History of African Americans, edited by Robin D. G. Kelley, and Earl Lewis, Oxford University Press, 2014. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/apus/detail.action?docID=679615.
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CHAPTER 4 We Changed the World 1945– 1970 Vincent Harding Robin D. G. Kelley Earl Lewis N ear the end of the Second World War, Adam Clayton Powell, Jr., one of black America’s most internationally conscious spokesmen, tried to place the ongoing African-American freedom movement into the context of the anticolonial struggles that were rising explosively out of the discontent of the nonwhite world. Already, movements for independence had begun in British colonies in West Africa and French colonies in West and Equatorial Africa. Later, colonies in North Africa and British East Africa joined the freedom struggle. Powell, who was both a flamboyant and effective congressman from Harlem and the pastor of that community’s best-known Christian congregation, the Abyssinian Baptist Church, declared: The black man continues on his way. He plods wearily no longer— he is striding freedom road with the knowledge that if he hasn’t got the world in a jug, at least he has the stopper in his hand. … He is ready to throw himself into the struggle to make the dream of America become flesh and blood, bread and butter, freedom and equality. He walks conscious of the fact that he is no longer alone no longer a minority. Although they might not have been able to express it in Powell’s colorful language, many black Americans were quite aware of the changes taking place. There were glaring differences, for instance, between where they grew up in the South and the Northern cities where they were trying to establish themselves for the first time. Most of the new arrivals realized that the North was not heaven, but they believed that it was a place where they could escape some of the most hellish aspects of their life in the South. For instance, they did not expect ever again to have to see the bodies of men hanging from trees after they had been riddled with bullets and often mutilated. They did not expect that women would be vulnerable to rape and exploitation simply because they were black and defenseless. In the Northern cities they did not expect to have to teach their children to move out of the path when white people were approaching.
To Make Our World Anew : A History of African Americans, edited by Robin D. G. Kelley, and Earl Lewis, Oxford University Press, 2014. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/apus/detail.action?docID=679615.
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CHAPTER 5 Into the Fire 1970 to the Present Robin D. G. Kelley A nyone strolling through the black ghettos of Chicago, Newark, or Los Angeles in 1973 probably noticed posters advertising Oscar Williams’s new film, Five on the Black Hand Side , pasted along the sides of temporary plywood walls or on abandoned buildings. You could tell by the poster’s cartoon illustrations that this was a comedy. In the center is a conservatively dressed black businessman surrounded by dozens of crazy-looking people: Some are protesting, some are fighting, some are simply enjoying each other’s company. Even though the characters in the poster are decked out in bell bottoms, platform shoes, and serious Afro puffs, this film is not another action-packed ghetto drama about pimps, hipsters, and black crime-fighters, like the ever-popular Superfly or Shaft . Instead it is a comedy about the trials and tribulations of the black middle class. Challenging the more common films about hustlers and ghetto violence, the text of the poster summons us all to the theater: “You’ve been coffytized, blacula-rized and super-flied— but now you’re gonna be glorified, unified and filledwith-pride … when you see Five On the Black Hand Side.” The poster, like the film itself, marked a transition taking place in black political attitudes. During the early to mid-seventies, there was a little less talk of revolution and more emphasis on winning local elections. The push for black pride and black unity we often associate with the “sixties generation” did not die, however. On the contrary, the ideas of the Black Power movement reached its apex in the seventies. Black was in. Afros and African garments were not only in style but had become even more popular among ordinary African Americans. The slogan “Black is Beautiful” lingered well after the decline of Black Power. Militant black nationalist organizations, such as the Black Panther party, the Republic of New Afrika, and the Black Liberation Front, continued to gain local support in urban neighborhoods for their advocacy of armed self-defense, black control over political and economic institutions, and efforts to build black pride and self-esteem. Yet, with legal segregation finally gone, thanks to the Civil Rights movement, upwardly mobile black families headed for the suburbs, and many working-class parents believed their children would enjoy a better life than they had.
To Make Our World Anew : A History of African Americans, edited by Robin D. G. Kelley, and Earl Lewis, Oxford University Press, 2014. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/apus/detail.action?docID=679615.
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