TransformingAmericaFinalScript

TITLE:Lesson 4 - “A Dream Deferred”

WRITER:Ken Harrison

PRODUCER:Julia Dyer

DRAFT:FINAL

DATE:January 3, 2005

Transforming America TA 104 – FINAL “A Dream Deferred”  01/03/05  1

VisualAudio

Introduction (00:32) / Music up
  1. Montage of Actors silhouettes
  2. Minorities in the late 1800s
/ ACTORS:
What happens to a dream deferred?
Does it dry up like a raisin in the sun….
Or fester like a sore….and then run?
Does it stink like rotten meat….
Or crust and sugar over, like syrupy sweet?
Maybe it just sags, like a heavy load….
Or does it….explode?
Segment #1: Strange Fruit (7:53)
Learning Objective: Explain how and why African-Americans faced discrimination in the late nineteenth century.
  1. B-roll – slave cabins…
/ NEGRO SPIRITUAL SONG:
O-o-oh lord, does it…..
  1. Dianne Swann-Wright on camera
Super: Dianne Swann-Wright
  1. Family photos
  1. B-roll from Shaping America: 19th century southern plantation, slave quarters, Shenandoah Valley landscapes and farm footage
/ DIANNE SWANN-WRIGHT (9356/09:01:06): Both sides of my family, my mother’s family and my father’s family, had been enslaved in Virginia in a countycalled BuckinghamCounty. Our family story is very similar to other family stories because people who had been enslaved on a number of plantations decided not to leave, not to go to cities, not to go to towns, but to stay on those plantations and continue to work. And they kept their families together and stayed there for generations.
  1. Actor silhouette
  2. Pic of Henry Grady
  3. Urban street scenes in Southern cities
/ ACTOR as HENRY W. GRADY: There is a New South, not through protest against the Old, but because of new conditions, new adjustments, and if you please, new ideas and aspirations. We have sowed towns and cities in the place of theories, and put business above politics.
  1. Steven Hahn on camera
Super: Steven Hahn, University of Pennsylvania
  1. Southern industry
/ STEVEN HAHN (2527,09:02:51:00): Henry Grady isthenewspaper person who supposedly coined the idea of the New South – a south that was more urban, a south that was more industrial, a south that was undergoing a process of modernization. Some historians argue that the old elite basically held on in power and its control over land andthe labor force, and that the so-called New South looked a lot like the old south.
NEGRO SPIRITUAL SONG: Oh come on….come on…
  1. Actor silhouette
  2. Pic of Ida B. Wells
/ ACTOR as IDA B. WELLS: There is little difference between the Antebellum South and the New South. Her white citizens are wedded to any method for the subjugationof the dark race.
  1. Dianne Swann-Wright
/ DIANNE SWANN-WRIGHT (09:03:56): My family became sharecroppers and tenant farmers. If we were to look back in time and to look at their lives, we would say they were very, very poor.
  1. David Levering Lewis
Super: David Levering Lewis, New York University
  1. Sharecroppers with farming gear and livestock
  1. CUs of ledgers from the furnishing merchant (?)
/ DAVID LEVERING LEWIS (08:10:45):Sharecropping as a means of a livelihood was not a job description that I think most people would envy. It meant that you were on a kind of risk or a bet, that at the end of the planting season you would have grown just enough to liquidate the debt that you had accumulated for your seeds, equipment and your mule, and the rest of it, and that you could then start afresh laying some profit aside. It seldom worked that way. It turned out that the books were cooked and that the sharecropper was more deeply indebted year by year. By the 1900s sharecropping is slavery by another name.
  1. Dianne Swann-Wright
    B-roll or pics of impoverished black residence (could be slave quarters from Shaping America)
/ DIANNE SWANN-WRIGHT (09:05:37): There really wasn’t a whole lot of difference in terms of slavery and freedom economically. I think that the main difference was that people had control of themself and control of their children. Ad so people didn’t have to worry about being separated or sold. So freedom was significant, but not because they were able to gain economic advantage.
  1. Image of southern blacks showing deference to whites
/ NEGRO SPIRITUAL SONG: If you wanna go to heaven….
  1. Civil Rights Act
  1. Supreme Court of 1883 or B-roll of Supreme Court
  1. Headlines re: decisions
  1. Separation between blacks and whites in signs, etc.; Jim Crow character in handbills and cartoons
/ NARRATOR: The economic impoverishment of the sharecropping system left black Americans in a weakened position to resist the emerging caste order. In the mid to late 1880’s, “Jim Crow” laws mandating separate facilities started to show up on the books in southern states.
  1. David Levering Lewis
  2. Image of blacks serving and caring for whites under slavery
  1. Pics of southern cities, industry, railroads
/ DAVID LEVERING LEWIS (08:15:57): It’s one of the paradoxes of the South that one race is responsible for the labor, and the care and feeding, indeed, of many, many white people; and by 1900 there is an ideology that professes contamination if the races live, eat, heaven forbid, sleep, dine together. But of course the point of it all was, once again, to maintain power on the part of those people who were developing this New South.
  1. Headlines and images re: Plessy v. Ferguson decision
/ NARRATOR: In 1896, black activists organized to mount a legal challenge to segregation, but lost their case in the landmark Supreme Court decision, Plessy vs. Ferguson.
  1. David Levering Lewis
/ DAVID LEVERINGLEWIS (08:18:15): Plessy vs. Fergusondeclaredthat one could have racial democracy, but separately – that the races could go about their businesses separately but equally.
Spiritual Music up.
  1. Montage of segregation notices, “Whites Only”, etc.
/ NARRATOR: The Plessydecision affirmed the Jim Crow laws already on the books and opened the door for legal segregation to become institutionalized throughout the South. Its implications were long-term, far-reaching, and drove to the core of what it meant to be free.
  1. Michele Mitchell
Super: Michele Mitchell, University of Michigan / MICHELE MITCHELL(9412, 23:04:25): That case is also very important in terms ofthe way it spoke tofitness for citizenship; not whether or not you have equal rights to sit on the streetcar, to take the streetcar, but your very fitness for citizenship.
  1. Steven Hahn on camera
  2. Cartoons and/or pics re black voting, poll taxes, literacy tests, election violence and coercion, etc.
/ STEVEN HAHN (09:11:00:00): If you look at white southerners, the thing that makes them nuts is the right to vote. They do not accept the legitimacy of people who had been slaves now basically in a position of political citizenship. And it’s something that they try mightily to go after as soon as they possibly can. Theyattempt to make registration more difficult, in some cases to impose poll taxesto try to play, not simply to the poverty of African-American voters, but also to their illiteracy. By the early 20th century, the African-American participation in theelectoral process plummets to almost nothing.
  1. Pics or cartoons depicting intimidation of southern blacks
/ BILLIE HOLIDAY (singing):
Blood on the leaves…and blood at the root….
Black bodies swinging in the southern breeze….
Strange fruit hanging from the poplar trees….
NARRATOR: The denial of economic opportunity, social access and political redress was sustained by a systematic intimidation of African-Americans.
  1. Jacqueline Royster
Super: Jacqueline Jones Royster, OhioStateUniversity / JACQUELINE JONES ROYSTER (14:04:02):Destruction of property was a primary way. The taking away of material resources of all sorts was a way. But certainly the threat of the loss of life was a persistent horror.
  1. Pics of late 19th century lynchings
/ ROYSTER cont. (14:05:12): Lynching is an old phenomenon. Before the Civil War it wasn’t used quite so much against African-American people because they were considered to be property and you didn’t destroy your property. After the Civil War, then that property value was no longer in place.
  1. Diane Swann-Wright on camera
  1. Blacks and whites in public places (segregation)
  1. Pic of Dianne’s father
/ DIANNESWANN-WRIGHT (09:09:46): You just didn’t go to some places. You just didn’t travel on some forms of transportation. You would never drink from a water fountain that white people drank from. You would step off the sidewalk ifyou were approached by a white person. My father, who was a very good man and a strong man, always called white men, no matter what their age, mister or sir. And there was a whole collection ofways that people learned following the Civil War and certainly into the 20th century that made a difference between your staying well and healthy and able to live with your family, or being punished or sent to jail or beaten.
Segment #2: Hammering at the Truth (7:49)
Learning objective: Analyze the responses of African-Americans, particularly as expressed by recognized black leaders, to their plight.
  1. Steven Hahn on camera
Super: Steven Hahn, University of Pennsylvania
  1. Images depicting black churches, schools, community activity
/ STEVEN HAHN (2527, 09:04:38:00): Wethink aboutthe Jim Crow South asa nadir of African-American life and in many ways it seemed to be, in terms of violence and economic disadvantage. But African-Americans struggled mightily to make a new South for themselves. Wherever you lookyou see black churches, black schools, black associational lifeand it’s part of a process to try to struggle within the South tohave more control over their lives. They didn’t get everything they wanted, but they made important strides along those lines.
  1. Blacks in professions (law, medicine)
/ NARRATOR: A number of black leaders rose to prominence in this period, to speak publicly for a population that had been largely silenced. Their responses to discrimination ranged from anger to accommodation.
  1. Actor silhouette
  2. Booker T. Washington
/ ACTOR as BOOKER T. WASHINGTON: I believe it is the duty of the Negro, as the greater part of the race is already doing, to deport himself modestly in regard to political claims.
  1. Booker T. Washington giving speech at Atlanta Exposition, 1895
/ NARRATOR: Born a slave, author and educator Booker T. Washington saw blacks as an integral part of the economy of the New South. He urged Southern businessmen to hire blacks rather than immigrants for their industrial enterprises.
  1. David Levering Lewis
Super: David Levering Lewis, New York University
  1. Blacks as tradesmen, craftsmen, teachers, factory workers
/ DAVID LEVERING LEWIS (08:21:55): When he delivered his Atlanta address in 1895he said we will be hardworking and frugal and obedient. And in return there will be the opportunityto prosper, slowly, modestly, but in time robustly. And so economic prosperity would eventually, he promised, lead to the kind of civil rights that the imprudent and premature demands for them have precluded.
  1. Michelle Mitchell
Super: Michele Mitchell, University of Michigan
  1. Image of hard work and hope—perhaps a black craftsman or shop owner?
/ MICHELE MITCHELL (23:25:28): I thinkon a certain levelwhat he was saying was really quite powerful and persuasive because I think it spoke to a sort of ethic – American possibility in terms of what you can do, what you can make of yourself. And so, there’s acomplex response in terms of African-Americans saying at one point – we certainly agree with him on the one hand, but then what he’s arguing is anathema because it’s only going toreinforce the prescribed sphere in which we’re beingsqueezed into.
  1. Headlines of Plessy vs. Ferguson or image depicting segregation
/ NARRATOR: On the eve of Plessy vs. Ferguson, Washington voiced no objection to segregation.
  1. Actor silhouette
/ ACTORas BOOKER T. WASHINGTON: 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.
  1. Actor silhouette
  2. Images depicting blacks in servile positions
/ ACTORas W.E.B. DUBOIS: Mr. Washington represents in Negro thought the old attitude of adjustment and submission. Is it possible and probable, that nine millions of men can make effective progress and economic lives if they are deprived of political rights, made a servile caste, and allowed only the most meager chance for developing their exceptional men?
  1. W.E.B. DuBois
/ NARRATOR: Among Washington’s most vocal critics was the writer and intellectual, W.E.B. DuBois.
  1. Actor silhouette
  2. Images of discrimination and segregation
/ ACTOR as W.E.B. DUBOIS: We want full manhood suffrage, and we want it now, henceforth and forever. We want discrimination in public accommodation to cease. We claim the right of freemen to walk, talk, and be with them that wish to be with us. We want the laws enforcedagainst white as well as black. We want our children educated.
  1. David Levering Lewis
  1. COPYSTAND: Cover of “Souls of Black Folks”
/ DAVID LEVERING LEWIS (9:00:53): W.E.B. DuBois was a most unusual man – brilliant, exquisitely educated. He looms large becauseof a book he wrotein 1903, a book called The Souls of Black Folk, a collection of 16 essaysthat became the charterfor those African-Americans who increasingly were suspicious of, and indeed deeply offended by, the solutions that Booker T. Washington had proffered. The sum of it was DuBois’s position that you cannot get your rights by brokering them away, that the logic ofrights is that you don’t give them up. Indeed, you demand them, and you demand them not in the fullness of time, but as the rights of a citizen immediately.
  1. Actor silhouette
  2. Black voting & agitation
/ ACTOR as W.E.B. DUBOIS: How shall we get them? By voting where we may vote….by persistent, unceasing agitation….by hammering at the truth….by sacrifice and work.
  1. Ida B. Wells; images of her newspaper
/ NARRATOR: One black leader who lived out DuBois’ creed of action and agitation was Ida B. Wells. Journalist, lecturer and crusader, Wells fearlessly used her Memphis newspaper as a tool to confront the campaign of violence against blacks in the South.
  1. Jacqueline Royster
Super: Jacqueline Jones Royster, OhioStateUniversity
  1. Image of lynching
  2. Newspaper accounts or pics (if any exist) of the People’s Grocery Store or the lynching; or, pics of Memphis circa 1890s
  3. Ida B. Wells
/ JACQUELINE JONES ROYSTER (14:20:52): She had three friends who were lynched. They were owners of the People’s Grocery Store in Memphis. White people in that community did not want to share that economic opportunity with them. She was furious about that. She didn’t have a lot of friends, for one thing, but she was also concerned quite righteously about what it meant to live in a nation where there were laws and where there was supposed to be justice and where people were not supposed to be victimized in the ways that she knew that these three men were victimized.
  1. Actor silhouette
  2. Newspaper accounts continued
/ ACTOR as IDA B. WELLS: They were loaded on a switch engine of the railroad which ran back of the jailcarried a mile north of the city limits and horribly shot to death. It is said that Tom Moss begged for his life for the sake of his wife and child and his unborn baby.
  1. Jacqueline Royster
/ JACQUELINE JONES ROYSTER (14:21:48): So she wrote an editorial about the real cause of that lynchingand went on to make her case for what she thought the real story was.
  1. Actor silhouette
  2. Lynching images
/ ACTOR as IDA B. WELLS: This is what opened my eyes to what lynching really was – an excuse to get rid of Negroes who were acquiring wealth and property and thus keep the race terrorized and “keep the nigger down”.
  1. Jacqueline Royster
  1. Ida Wells speaking
/ JACQUELINE JONES ROYSTER (9404, 15:03:00):She was a tinywoman but she carried a great big stick – getting the word out, getting the truth out, and then using her rhetorical abilities to be persuasive.
  1. Lynching headlines, photos
/ NARRATOR: Wells continued her anti-lynching campaign for the rest of her life. She called on her black audiences to leverage their economic power to demand justice. If justice was not forthcoming, she urged them to migrate north and deprive the South of their labor. In the face of the ongoing threat of murder and dismemberment, Wells exhorted African-Americans to meet fire with fire.
  1. Ida B. Wells
  1. Pic of Winchester rifle
/ ACTOR as IDA B. WELLS: The more the Afro-American yields and cringes and begs, the more he has to do so, the more he is insulted, outraged and lynched. A Winchester rifle should have a place of honor in every black home. And it should be used for that protection which the law refuses to give.
  1. Reprise of images from segment
/ NARRATOR: Accommodation…agitation…direct action…African-American leaders of the late 19th century advocated a wide range of responses to the conditions of life in the Jim Crow south. None of these strategies did much to improve the daily lives of blacks living in the South, but they were beginning to build the arguments and the institutions that would grow and bear fruit in the coming century.
Segment #3: A Very Gendered Thing (8:36)
Learning Objective: Analyze the conditions experienced by women at this time and what responses they were making to discrimination.
  1. Black and white women activists
/ Music up
NARRATOR: Like African-Americans, women’s struggle for equality in the late 19th century was an uphill battle. Having been left out of the 15thAmendment, a woman’s right to vote in most states was still decades away. But many women, both black and white, were making their way into the public arena – writing, speaking and organizing for a change on a variety of issues.
  1. Nancy Hewitt, RutgersUniversity on camera
Super: Nancy Hewitt, RutgersUniversity
  1. Images depicting women working
  2. Women participating in local politics
/ NANCYHEWITT (9378, 01:01:48): Labor issues were absolutely critical, both getting women into the economy, into access to jobs, issues around political accessso the right to petition, the right to attend meetings, the right to hold office as well as to vote, and issues around education. Without literacy, without access to reading, writing, math, history, women were going to always be limited in terms of the progress they could make in other areas.