I. The West

• Settling the West
• New farms, new markets
• Railroads change economy
• New farm implements
• Steel tipped plow
• McCormick reapers
• Community life
• Lone individualism mostly a myth
• People settled mostly around communities
• Family and neighbors
• Suffrage
• Gets its first start in the west
• Scarcity of women make them more valuable, thus given more power

• Transformation of southern economy
• South's infrastructure destroyed during the Civil War
• Roads, RR's, etc. are gone
• Shortage of credit or banks
• Weaknesses of education system
• Rise of the New South economy
• Sharecropping
• Extractive industries
• Textile mills
• Northern control of the southern economy
• Growth of Jim Crow segregation
• Jim Crow a gradual development
• did not happen overnight
• postwar, not a pre-Civil War phenomenon
• happened South and North (to a much lesser degree)
• First signs--voting
• Poll taxes and literacy tests
• Exemptions--grandfather clauses
• Schools and transportation
• earliest school segregation cases from Mass. in 1850s (C.J. Lemeul Shaw--abolitionist--ruled in favor of "separate but equal facilities")
• several other northern states adopted separate systems
• long accepted rule that passengers on RR's could be segregated on reasonable grounds, so long as facilities substantially equal
• women/men
• smokers/non-smokers
• Penn. passed law in 1867 that separated the races on RR (blacks sit in back of car)
• Most states gradually began to implement laws mandating separate transportation facilities--primarily on intrastate vehicles at first--streetcars, local RRs, local boats and ferries
• Official segregation of public schools began to grow during the 1870s and 1880s
• by the mid-1890s, many states were beginning to get serious about offically segregating the races
• Different white views on race relations
• Liberal -- strongest in 1880s
• believed that abilities of African Americans had never been fully explored, their potential unknown
• sought to assimilate blacks into mainstream American culture through education--compare with Booker T. Washington
• never gained much of a following in the South
• Radical
• insisted that the black race had no place in the America of the future
• held that emancipation and Reconstruction had sent the blacks spiraling downward into a state of savagery--slavery had been the only thing that had kept blacks civilized
• radicals eagerly looked forward to the demise of the race in America
• strongest in the late 1880s and 1890s
• Radicals gained its mass following in the 1880s and 1890s because that was a period of economic depression during which poorer men were unable to support their families adequately--Feelings of failure were compensated for by rage against the blacks
• Radicals viewed lynching as a means of controlling what they saw as the "black beast rapist"
• Gov. Ben Tillman of S.C. and Thomas Dixon (The Klansman) were strongest proponents of this view
• Conservative
• advocated the control rather than the destruction of blacks based on a fundamental belief in the racial inferiority of African Americans
• Conservatives kept alive the Southern ideal of the organic society, with its feudalistic roots of proper hierarchies in social relationships
• For the organic society to function properly, each element must know its place, and the proper place for blacks was as subordinated laborers
• by late 1890s, this had become the dominant view in the South
• Plessy v. Ferguson (USSC, 1896)
• Supreme Court and state police power
• earlier Supreme Court cases--Slaughterhouse Cases (1873), United States vs. Cruikshank (1876), and Powell vs. Pennsylvania (1888)--established that states could establish reasonable regulations of social and economic behavior
• key test was the "reasonableness" of use of power
• These decisions set the constitutional stage for "fact"-based discrimination stemming from scientific and popular views of blacks as an inferior race
• passage of the Separate Car Act (1890) by the Louisiana legislature--required separate cars for different races on all trains carrying black and white passengers
• challenged by Louisiana black leaders
• Plessy's attorneys argued that the Fourteenth Amendment provided protection of all rights of citizens protected prior to the Civil War by either state or federal governments--in essence, their argument rested on a color-blind Constitution
• Justice Henry Billings Brown wrote for the majority
• easily concluded that the Louisiana separate car law constituted a reasonable exercise of the state's police power
• He stated that the Fourteenth Amendment did not categorically prohibit states from establishing race distinctions in statutory law
• Justice John Marshall Harlan provided the only dissent
• a former slave holder from Kentucky
• argued that the Reconstruction Amendments categorically outlawed race distinctions
• Following Plessy decision, southern states moved quickly to cement the idea of official segregation in public places
• Rise of second KKK in 1915
• instability of times helped give boost to racism that was widespread in the U.S.
• began in Stone Mountain, GA
• influenced by release of Birth of a Nation
• lasted until the late 1920s
• Differing paths to African American power
• While the years following the Compromise of 1877 witnessed increasing emphasis on economic development, self-help, racial solidarity, and race pride, the Reconstruction emphases on the franchise, political activity, and civil rights continued
• Booker T. Washington--late 1880s-1910s
• placed strong emphasis on gaining technical skills as way of gaining power and status
• Industrial education among blacks had a long history before Booker T. Washington emerged as a figure of national stature. A generation before he founded Tuskegee, blacks advocated industrial education as part of a program of self-help and racial solidarity
• W.E.B. DuBois (Souls of the Black Folk, 1903)
• disputes ideas of Washington
• argues blacks should fight for economic, political, and educational equality
• Founding of the N.A.A.C.P.
• 1905, DuBois and other black critics of Washington start the Niagra Movement
• 1909, Oswald Garrison Villard and other white progressives join with members of the Niagra Movement in organizing the NAACP
• organization rejects accomodationist stance
• calls for full equality and end to racial discrimination
• mainly a northern-based movement at first
• seeks to change the laws