Chapter 11 Section 3
I. Resistance and Repression
A. After Reconstruction, most African Americans were sharecroppers, or landless farmers who had to give the landlord a large share of their crops to cover their costs for rent and farming supplies.
B. In 1879 Benjamin “Pap” Singleton organized a mass migration of African Americans, called Exodusters, from the rural South to Kansas.
C. Some African Americans that stayed in the South formed the Colored Farmers’ National Alliance. The organization worked to help its members set up cooperatives. Many African Americans joined the Populist Party.
D. Threatened by the power of the Populist Party, Democratic leaders began using racism to try to win back the poor white vote in the South. By 1890 election officials in the South began using methods to make it difficult for African Americans to vote.
II. Disfranchising African Americans
A. Southern states used loopholes in the Fifteenth Amendment and began to impose restrictions that barred almost all African Americans from voting.
B. In 1890 Mississippi required all citizens registering to vote to pay a poll tax, which most African Americans could not afford to pay. The state also required all prospective voters to take a literacy test. Most African Americans had no education and failed the test. Other Southern states adopted similar restrictions. The number of African Americans and poor whites registered to vote fell dramatically in the South.
C. To allow poor whites to vote, some Southern states had a grandfather clause in theirvoting restrictions. This clause allowed any man to vote if he had an ancestor on thevoting rolls in 1867.
III. Legalizing Segregation
A. In the late 1800s, both the North and the South discriminated against African Americans. In the South, segregation, or separation of the races, was enforced by laws known as Jim Crow laws.
B. In 1883 the Supreme Court overturned the Civil Rights Act of 1875. The ruling meant that private organizations or businesses were free to practice segregation.
C. Southern states passed a series of laws that enforced segregation in almost all public places.
D. The Supreme Court ruling in Plessyv. Ferguson endorsed “separate but equal” facilities for African Americans. This ruling established the legal basis for discrimination in the South for over 50 years.
E. In the late 1800s, mob violence increased in the United States, particularly in the South. Between 1890 and 1899, hundreds of lynchings—executions without proper court proceedings—took place. Most lynchings were in the South, and the victims were mostly African Americans.
IV. The African American Response
A. In 1892 Ida B. Wells, an African American from Tennessee, began a crusade against lynching. She wrote newspaper articles and a book denouncing lynchings and mob violence against African Americans.
B. Booker T. Washington, an African American educator, urged fellow African Americans to concentrate on achieving economic goals rather than legal or political ones. He explained his views in a speech known as the Atlanta Compromise.
C. The Atlanta Compromise was challenged by W.E.B. Du Bois, the leader of African American activists born after the Civil War. Du Bois said that white Southerners continued to take away the civil rights of African Americans, even though they were making progress in education and vocational training. He believed that African Americans had to demand their rights, especially voting rights, to gain full equality.