Rethinking Race and the origins of a split among white v. black and black v.

black

Professor Robert J. Norrell

• Professor Norrell is the Fulbright Distinguished Chair in American Studies at the University of Tübingen for 2010-2011. A native of Alabama, he earned the B.A. and Ph.D. at the University of Virginia. Professor Norrell writes mainly about American race relations. In 2009 Norrell published a revisionist biography, Up from History: the Life of Booker T. Washington, to some acclaim.* In 2005 he published a well-reviewed interpretive synthesis of race relations in the twentieth-century United States,

• Mr. Davison does not in any way endorse racism or racial stereotypes

• Historically we must learn how these stereotypes take shape in our collective consciousness

• Racism is learned behavior• We must therefore understand how it

develops to avoid it developing again• How the “N word” became a dirty word!!

PLEASE TAKE NOTE

In the Beginning

• Booker T. Washington v. George Washington Carver and W.E.B. DuBoise- 3 Men = 3 differing ideas

Booker T. Washington’s controversial

historical reputation

Lifting the Veil of ignorance or

lowering it down over African Americans?

Lynching• Between 1889 and 1918, a total of

2,522 black Americans were lynched• Myth: punishment for rape but

lynching mostly from conflicts over money

• “The real purpose of these savage demonstrations is to teach the Negro that in the South he has no rights that the law will enforce. Samuel Hose was burned to teach the Negroes that no matter what a white man does to them, they must not resist.”--Ida Wells-Barnett

White supremacy in our culture is nothing

new!

• Minstrel shows• Thomas Rice singer

and performer and his character “Jumpin’ Jim Crow.”

Jim Crow altered in the 1890s

Minstrel race stereotypes

Zip Coon the Dandyaccompanied by Jim Crow

(note the ill fitting clothing and the clownish tiny hat)

Coon songs the rage of the stage in the 1890s, up to the early 1900s

A Way to Make a Living

Tin Pan Alley

Sheet music

Newspapers became more visual in the 1890s.Ads routinely appealed to race.

Question????

• Why do you think in this age of rapid industrialization and massive immigration that more and more people would discriminate against RACE?

IllustratedPolice/courtcolumns

Thomas Dixon, novelist

• Blacks as economic competitors

Film: Birth of a Nation

• Based on Thomas Dixon’s best-selling racist fiction

• First modern American film, 1915

• Huge audience

Amos ‘n’ Andytake racist images toradio

Ben Tillman, SC

The Negro bears about him a birthright of inferiority that is as unalterable as eternity. [God] has also set his seal upon the Negro forever in his black skin, kinky hair,, thick lips, flat nose, double layer of skull . . . His stupid intellect is fulfilled in prophesy, uttered thousands of years ago, but no less true today. “A servant of servants shalt thou be.”

White nationalists

• Blacks the enemy• No rights, no land, no

decent job• No education• James K. Vardaman of

Mississippi

                                                                 

              

Segregation

• Segregation an all encompassing system of white supremacy over blacks

Segregation’s components• Disfranchisement• Separation in public

places• Education

discrimination• Employment

discrimination• Some economic

opportunities closed entirely to blacks

• Deference expected• Police and courts

treat blacks unfairly

Segregation by custom• blacks call at whites’ back door• don’t eat meals at the same table• blacks can’t try on clothes in stores• blacks don’t board streetcar or bus until all whites on• blacks supposed to step off sidewalk• blacks get no courtesy titles • segregated gates, pay windows, bathhouses at industrial plants. • separate Bibles in courtrooms

How were blacks disfranchised?

• terrorism

• changing polling places secretly

• ballot box stuffing

• Ballot boxes stolen

• buying votes or paying some not to vote

• complex ballot and secret ballot—Tennessee’s Dortch law

• disqualification for petit crime

Constitutional disfranchisement

• Defeat of Populists clears the way• whites remove blacks legally and

constitutionally• 1890 Mississippi --literacy, $2 poll tax• Williams v. Mississippi, 1898• 1895 SC constitution--literacy or property• 1898 Louisiana Grandfather clause

Constitutional disfranchisement

• Property qualifications• Grandfather clause• Boards of registrars enforce character or

understanding requirements. White vouchers. white primary

• Louisiana black voters fell from 130k to 5k• Alabama black voters fell from 100+ to 3k

Economic Lives of African-Americans

• declining black landownership• sharecropping: debt slavery• blacks lose hold on crafts • most urban blacks work in domestic service• competitive nature of black-white relations in the

economic sphere• whites drive blacks out of better-paying industrial jobs• shut out of some industries--textiles, furniture

Economic Discrimination• blacks safe only in jobs whites don’t want--service or dirty, unskilled industrial jobs

• service: washerwomen, maids, cooks, chauffeur, porter. Pay v. low.

• blacks concentrated in timber, tobacco, mining industries. Southern industries

have “negro” jobs

• mechanization: “negro” jobs turned into white ones

• unions white-dominated and mostly anti-black

• AFL, construction trades exclusionary

• railroad brotherhoods drive blacks out of jobs

Walt Disney & Jim Crow

Jim Crow laws• intermarriage outlawed, starting in 1870• restaurants, hotels, parks, theatres• segregation laws, starting in 1875• railroads 1880s• streetcars 1890s• toilets, drinking fountains, elevators in urban

buildings after 1900

The Freedmen’s desire for

literacy

Tuskegee Institute at the founding in 1881

Students made brick and built the campus

Students earned room and board and learned useful skills.

The first new building impressed one and all and fostered pride among students.

Tuskegee’s purpose: Training school teachers

All-black faculty

and staff at TI

Tuskegee Institute: Large, beautiful campus with more than 20 impressive brick buildings

G. W. Carver led the effort

to educate black farmers

Jesup Agricultural Wagon

Booker T. Washington a fund-raising genius

BTW’s Atlanta Exposition Address:

racial peace, room for blacks to

maneuver

BTW challenged ugly black stereotypes with his writing as well as his speeches.

Racial violence, like that in Wilmington,

NC, in 1898, kept racial feelings harsh.

New race atrocities, like the lynching and burning of Sam Hose in Ga. In 1899 brought new criticism of BTW’s

leadership.

BTW and Theodore Roosevelt, a political

alliance, but eventually TR betrays Washington.

White politicians like Tom Heflin of Alabama hated BTW for

proposing that blacks would eventually gain equality in

American life.

Growing opposition to all black education.

The Atlanta riot of 1906 made

BTW’s leadership look ineffectual.

A Thomas Dixon play called "The Clansman" glorified the Ku Klux Klan and denigrated blacks, exacerbating racial tensions in 1905. Racial hostility was intensified the next year during a race-baiting political campaign for governor. The local press contributed to the climate by publishing a number of articles claiming that black men had sexually assaulted white women.

The challenge of WEB Du Bois, a complex

story of personal rivalry and mistrust.

(Feb.23, 1868- Aug. 27, 1963)

Du Bois and Washington very different

• Du Bois a northerner: from more tolerant environment.

• Du Bois an intellectual

• pioneering studies in black history and sociology

• influenced by German Romantics. Philosophical acceptance of race. A Racial Romantic

• faith in the virtues of African peoples to improve the world socialist after 1911

• pan-Africanist, by 1919

• rejection of integration during the 1920s

• about 1901 he became more critical of BTW’s educational program

• personal dispute. Railroad Case. Washington job.

• Talented Tenth--faith in the educated elite

• insisted on need for political power

• resentment of BTW’s power with politicians, philanthropists

• advocated protest. Niagara Movement, 1905

• essentially in agreement with BTW up to 1901. For economic strategy, industrial education

The Du Bois critique

N Years of worry and travel tooktheir toll on Booker T. Washington’s health.

(April 5, 1856 – November 14, 1915)

One of BTW’s great legacies, the 5000 Rosenwald schools in the South.

"Biological arguments for racism may have been common before 1850, but they increased by orders of magnitude following the acceptance of the evolutionary theory." Evolutionist Stephen J. Gould, 1977

"We do not want word to go out that we want to exterminate the Negro population... [in case] it ever occurs to any of their more rebellious members." Margaret Sanger, founder of Planned Parenthood

"We have suffered through two world wars and are threatened by an Armageddon. We have had enough of the Darwinian fallacy." Scientist Kenneth Hsu, "Reply," Geology, 15 (1987), p. 177

Mississippi Gov. Ross Barnett

Confederate Pride at Ol Miss

Edmund Pettus BridgeMarch 1965

Martin Luther King Jr. Center for Peace and Justice Atlanta Ga.

M. L. King Jr. Ctr.