Responding to Jim Crow, 1890-1920

Explain how African Americans responded to segregation, disenfranchisement, and racial violence in the period 1890 to 1920.

Ida B. Wells, journalist and co-owner of the Memphis Free Speech, pamphlet Southern Horrors: Lynch Law in All Its Phases, published in New York, 1892

The Afro-Americans of Memphis denounced the lynching of three of their best citizens, and urged and waited for the authorities to act in the matter and bring the lynchers to justice. No attempt was made to do so, and the black men left the city by thousands, bringing about great stagnation in every branch of business. Those who remained so injured the business of the street car company by staying off the cars, that the superintendent, manager and treasurer called personally on the editor of the Free Speech, asked them to urge our people to give them their patronage again. . . . Nothing is more definitely settled than he must act for himself. I have shown how he may employ the boycott, emigration and the press, and I feel that by a combination of all these agencies can be effectually stamped out lynch law, that last relic of barbarism and slavery.

Booker T. Washington, principal of Tuskegee Institute in Alabama, address to the Cotton States and International Exposition, Atlanta, Georgia, 1895

Cast it down in agriculture, mechanics, in commerce, in domestic service, and in the professions. . . . 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 . . . . 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. . . . The wisest among my race understand that the agitation of questions of social equality is the extremest folly . . . . 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 exercises of these privileges.

United States Supreme Court, majority opinion by Justice Henry Billings Brown, Plessy v. Ferguson, 1896, upholding a Louisiana law requiring separate railway cars for Black and white passengers

The object of the amendment was undoubtedly to enforce the absolute equality of the two races before the law, but, in the nature of things, it could not have been intended to abolish distinctions based upon color, or to enforce social, as distinguished from political, equality, or a commingling of the two races upon terms unsatisfactory to either. . . . We consider the underlying fallacy of the plaintiff's argument to consist in the assumption that the enforced separation of the two races stamps the colored race with a badge of inferiority. If this be so, it is not by reason of anything found in the act, but solely because the colored race chooses to put that construction upon it.

W. E. B. Du Bois, sociologist at Atlanta University, "Of Mr. Booker T. Washington and Others," in The Souls of Black Folk, 1903

So far as Mr. Washington preaches Thrift, Patience, and Industrial Training for the masses, we must hold up his hands and strive with him . . . . But so far as Mr. Washington apologizes for injustice, North or South, does not rightly value the privilege and duty of voting, belittles the emasculating effects of caste distinctions, and opposes the higher training and ambition of our brighter minds, . . . we must unceasingly and firmly oppose them. By every civilized and peaceful method we must strive for the rights which the world accords to men

Claude McKay, Jamaican-born poet living in New York, "If We Must Die," sonnet first published in July 1919, during a summer of attacks by white mobs on Black communities in many American cities

If we must die, let it not be like hogs

Hunted and penned in an inglorious spot,

While round us bark the mad and hungry dogs,

Making their mock at our accursèd lot.

If we must die, O let us nobly die,

So that our precious blood may not be shed

In vain; then even the monsters we defy

Shall be constrained to honor us though dead!

O kinsmen! we must meet the common foe!

Though far outnumbered let us show us brave,

And for their thousand blows deal one death-blow!

What though before us lies the open grave?

Like men we'll face the murderous, cowardly pack,

Pressed to the wall, dying, but fighting back!