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Transcript

The African American Response

Competing Visions

Frederick Douglass

Frederick Douglass

On the End of Reconstruction:

You say you have emancipated us. You have; and I thank you for it. But what is your emancipation?

When the Israelites were emancipated they were told to go and borrow of their neighbors—borrow their coin, borrow their jewels, load themselves down with the means of subsistence; after, they should go free in the land which the Lord God gave them. When the Russian serfs had their chains broken and given their liberty, the government of Russia—aye, the despotic government of Russia—gave to those poor emancipated serfs a few acres of land on which they could live and earn their bread.

But when You turned us loose, you gave us no acres. You turned us loose to the sky, to the storm, to the whirlwind, and, worst, of all you turned us loose to the wrath of our infuriated masters.

The Great Migration

The Great Migration

Migration of about 5 million Southern Blacks to Northern and Western Urban Locations - Happens in Waves

Chicago, New York, Philadelphia, Detroit, Pittsburgh, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Portland, Seattle

Between 1880 and 1970

Increases dramatically during WWI

Leads to Harlem Renaissance

Long-Term Consequences

Reshaping Demographics;

Before 1880:

90% of African Americans lived in the South

By 1970:

47% of African Americans lived in the North and the West

Shifts from rural to urban

Shifts from South to North

Opens opportunities not available in Jim Crow South

Opens eyes to racial injustices in South (Emmett Till)

Examples of New-found Opportunity

From Smithsonian Magazine:

Richard Wright becomes novelist - boarded a train from Mississippi when he was 19 (His father was a sharecropper in Natchez)

“We look up at the high Southern sky,” Wright wrote in 12 Million Black Voices. “We scan the kind, black faces we have looked upon since we first saw the light of day, and, though pain is in our hearts, we are leaving.”

John Coltrane becomes jazz musician (not a tailor)

Bill Russell becomes NBA superstar (not mill worker)

Zora Neale Hurston becomes novelist - Left Baltimore after being placed as a maid with a traveling theater troupe that brought her north from Florida after her mother died

Jackie Robinson becomes a MLB star and first African American to play in the Majors - His mother migrated to California from a cotton plantation in Cairo, Georgia when Jackie was a baby in diapers (Had she not migrated, Jackie might have grown up to be a sharecropper)

Personal Story - Smithsonian Magazine

A little boy boarded a northbound train with his grandmother and extended family, along with their upright piano and the rest of their worldly possessions, stuffed inside wooden crates, to begin their journey out of Mississippi. It was 1935. They were packed into the Jim Crow car, which, by custom, was at the front of the train, the first to absorb the impact in the event of a collision. They would not be permitted into the dining car, so they carried fried chicken and boiled eggs to tide them over for the journey.

The little boy was 4 years old and anxious. He’d overheard the grown-ups talking about leaving their farm in Arkabutla, to start over up north. He heard them say they might leave him with his father’s people, whom he didn’t know. In the end they took him along. The near abandonment haunted him. He missed his mother, who would not be joining them on this journey; she was away trying to make a stable life for herself after the breakup with his father. He did not know when he would see her again.

The Story Continues

His grandfather had preceded them north. He was a hardworking, serious man who kept the indignities he suffered under Jim Crow to himself. In Mississippi, he had not dared stand up to some white children who broke the family’s wagon. He told the little boy that as black people, they had no say in that world. “There were things they could do that we couldn’t,” the boy would say of the white children when he was a grown man with gray hair and a son of his own.

The grandfather was so determined to get his family out of the South that he bought a plot of land sight unseen in a place called Michigan. On the trip north, the little boy and his cousins and uncles and aunts (who were children themselves) did not quite know what Michigan was, so they made a ditty out of it and sang it as they waited for the train. “Meatskin! Meatskin! We’re going to Meatskin!”

The Boy's Story....

They landed on freer soil, but between the fears of abandonment and the trauma of being uprooted from his mother, the little boy arrived with a stutter. He began to speak less and less. At Sunday school, the children bellowed with laughter whenever he tried. So instead, he talked to the hogs and cows and chickens on the farm, who, he said years later, “don’t care how you sound.”

The little boy went mute for eight years. He wrote down the answers to questions he was asked, fearing even to introduce himself to strangers, until a high school English teacher coaxed him out of his silence by having him read poetry aloud to the class.

Who Was that Boy?

That boy was James Earl Jones. He would go on to the University of Michigan, where he abandoned pre-med for theater. Later he would play King Lear in Central Park and Othello on Broadway, win Tony Awards for his performances in Fences and in The Great White Hope and star in films like Dr. Strange­love, Roots, Field of Dreams and Coming to America.

The voice that fell silent for so long would become among the most iconic of our time—the voice of Darth Vader in Star Wars, of Mufasa in The Lion King, the voice of CNN. Jones lost his voice, and found it, because of the Great Migration. “It was responsible for all that I am grateful for in my life,” he told me in a recent interview in New York. “We were reaching for our gold mines, our freedom.”

For Consideration

The Great Migration has been termed as similar to refugees:

Smithsonian Institute article states: "They were seeking political asylum within the borders of their own country, not unlike refugees in other parts of the world fleeing famine, war and pestilence."

Is this a fair assessment? Why or Why Not?

Can The Great Migration be seen as a means of "resistance," much like the resistance we saw during slavery? Why or Why Not?

Can you see connections between The Great Migration and Racial Tensions that still exist in NORTHERN cities today?

Back to Africa

First Proposed by Jefferson

Emancipation and colonization in Africa

Roots of Liberia

https://www.monticello.org/slavery-at-monticello/liberty-slavery/solution-jefferson-proposes-colonization

Liberia

A proposed solution:

Combine emancipation and colonization

Relocate freed slaves to Africa (colony of Liberia)

Thomas Jefferson

"I have seen no proposition so expedient . . . as that of emancipation of those [slaves] born after a given day, and of their education and expatriation at a proper age," 1814.

The American Colonization Society

1816

  • For purpose of emancipation and colonization
  • Free blacks could not be integrated into American society
  • Believed presence of free blacks was a threat to national well-being
  • Believed blacks could only thrive if transported back to Africa
  • Other motivations?
  • Transport OUT educated free blacks with vocal anti-slavery and abolitionists stance?
  • 3,000 blacks transported to Liberia between 1820 and 1931
  • 1847 - Liberia declares independence (only Western-oriented Nation in Africa)

Back to Africa Movement

Marcus Garvey

Universal Negro Improvement Association

Black Nationalism

Believed quest for equality was a "delusion"

White America would never allow assimilation and equality

Only solution: Back to Africa

Resettlement in Africa would bring true emancipation

Large following among lower classes,

returning servicemen (Post WWI)

Southerners who had migrated during the Great Migration

........WHY??

"IF YOU BELIEVE THE NEGRO HAS A SOUL"

http://historymatters.gmu.edu/d/5124

Booker T. Washington

Background

Post Reconstruction

Jim Crow Segregation

Cements Racial Hierarchy - Especially in South

BUT OVERALL

New and Better Opportunities

Military Service

Educational Opportunities

Booker T. Washington

Founder of Alabama’s Tuskegee Institute

Institution of higher learning

Philosophy of patience, industry, and economic stability;

Institute emphasized vocational training—

preparation for jobs - not just menial labor jobs, but high skilled service positions - lawyers, teachers, as well as survival jobs - farming, tradesman

Stressed education but USEFUL EDUCATION for Economic Independence

Basic Philosophy:

Self-Help

Racial Solidarity

Accommodation

Accept discrimination as it exists today and elevate themselves through hard work and prosperity - change would come gradually

Excerpts

Not only this, but the opportunity here afforded will awaken among us a new era of industrial progress. Ignorant and inexperienced, it is not strange that in the first years of our new life we began at the top instead of at the bottom; that a seat in Congress or the state legislature was more sought than real estate or industrial skill; that the political convention or stump speaking had more attractions than starting a dairy farm or truck garden.

Excerpts

A ship lost at sea for many days suddenly sighted a friendly vessel. From the mast of the unfortunate vessel was seen a signal,“Water, water; we die of thirst!” The answer from the friendly vessel at once came back, “Cast down your bucket where you are.” A second time the signal, “Water, water; send us water!” ran up from the distressed vessel, and was answered, “Cast down your bucket where you are.” And a third and fourth signal for water was answered, “Cast down your bucket where you are.” The captain of the distressed vessel, at last heeding the injunction, cast down his bucket, and it came up full of fresh, sparkling water from the mouth of the Amazon River. To those of my race who depend on bettering their condition in a foreign land or who underestimate the importance of cultivating friendly relations with the Southern white man, who is their next-door neighbor, I would say: “Cast down your bucket where you are”— cast it down in making friends in every manly way of the people of all races by whom we are surrounded.

Excerpts

Cast it down in agriculture, mechanics, in commerce, in domestic service, and in the professions. And in this connection it is well to bear in mind that whatever other sins the South may be called to bear, when it comes to business, pure and simple, it is in the South that the Negro is given a man’s chance in the commercial world, and in nothing is this Exposition more eloquent than in emphasizing this chance. Our greatest danger is that in the great leap from slavery to freedom we may overlook the fact that the masses of us are to live by the productions of our hands, and fail to keep in mind that we shall prosper in proportion as we learn to dignify and glorify common labour, and put brains and skill into the common occupations of life; shall prosper in proportion as we learn to draw the line between the superficial and the substantial, the ornamental gewgaws of life and the useful. No race can prosper till it learns that there is as much dignity in tilling a field as in writing a poem. It is at the bottom of life we must begin, and not at the top. Nor should we permit our grievances to overshadow our opportunities.

Excerpts

Casting down your bucket among my people, helping and encouraging them as you are doing on these grounds, and to education of head, hand, and heart, you will find that they will buy your surplus land, make blossom the waste places in your fields, and run your factories. While doing this, you can be sure in the future, as in the past, that you and your families will be surrounded by the most patient, faithful, law-abiding, and unresentful people that the world has seen. As we have proved our loyalty to you in the past, in nursing your children, watching by the sick-bed of your mothers and fathers, and often following them with tear-dimmed eyes to their graves, so in the future, in our humble way, we shall stand by you with a devotion that no foreigner can approach, ready to lay down our lives, if need be, in defense of yours, interlacing our industrial, commercial, civil, and religious life with yours in a way that shall make the interests of both races one. In all things that are purely social we can be as separate as the fingers, yet one as the hand in all things essential to mutual progress.

Excerpts

The wisest among my race understand that the agitation of questions of social equality is the extremest folly, and that progress in the enjoyment of all the privileges that will come to us must be the result of severe and constant struggle rather than of artificial forcing. No race that has anything to contribute to the markets of the world is long in any degree ostracized. It is important and right that all privileges of the law be ours, but it is vastly more important that we be prepared for the exercise of these privileges. The opportunity to earn a dollar in a factory just now is worth infinitely more than the opportunity to spend a dollar in an opera-house.

For Consideration

How does Washington's speech reflect his philosophy of self-help, gradualism, and the races working together?

What does the "bucket" metaphor mean?

What does the "fingers" on the "hand" metaphor mean?

Why does Washington refer to the South as a "foreign land?"

W.E.B.DuBois

WEB DuBois

"Education must not simply teach work, it must teach life"

Pushed for higher education for blacks to forment black leadership

Agitation is the only effective tool against racial hierarchy

Accuses Washington's strategy of keeping black man down

Promoted segregation for the benefit of Blacks

Founder of NAACP 1909

Basic Philosophy:

Agitation, protest, and education to advocate for civil rights and immediate results

The Souls of Black Folk - 1903

Collection of Essays

"It is a peculiar sensation, this double-consciousness, this sense of always looking at one's self through the eyes of others, of measuring one's soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity. One ever feels his two-ness -- an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder."

DuBois on Washington:

"... so far as Mr. Washington apologizes for injustice, North and South, does not rightly value the privilege and duty of voting, belittles the emasculating effects of caste distinctions, and opposes the higher training and education of our brighter minds -- so far as he, the South or the Nation does this -- we must unceasingly and firmly oppose them."

Of the Dawn of Freedom

"The problem of the twentieth century is the problem of the color-line, - the relation of the darker to the lighter races of men in Asian and Africa, in American and the islands of the sea....."

Is DuBois correct in this assumption?

Is this still true today (the twenty-first century? Why or why not?

On the Dawn of Freedom....

"No sooner had Northern armies touch Southern soil than this old question, newly guised, sprang from the earth, - What shall be done with the Negro? Peremptory military commands, this way and that, could not answer the query: the Emancipation Proclamation seemed to broaden and intensify the difficulties; and the War Amendments made the Negro problem today."

To what does DuBois attribute the issues that face the African Americans in the twentieth century?

Does the fact that the North wanted to end slavery, but did not have a plan to incorporate newly freed African Americans into the Union, as equal citizens, contribute to the racial tensions in the twentieth century? And beyond? Why or why not?

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