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

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

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PLEASE TAKE NOTE

• 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!!

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In the Beginning

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

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Booker T. Washingtons controversial historical
reputation
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Lifting the Veil of ignorance or lowering it down
over African Americans?
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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

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White supremacy in our culture is nothing new!

• Minstrel shows
• Thomas Rice singer and performer and his
  character Jumpin Jim Crow.

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Jim Crow altered in the 1890s
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Minstrel race stereotypes

• Zip Coon the Dandy
• accompanied by
• Jim Crow
• (note the ill fitting clothing and the clownish
  tiny hat)

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Coon songs the rage of the stage in the 1890s, up
to the early 1900s
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A Way to Make a Living
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Tin Pan Alley Sheet music
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Newspapers became more visual in the 1890s. Ads
routinely appealed to race.
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Question????

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

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Illustrated Police/ court columns
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Thomas Dixon, novelist

• Blacks as economic competitors

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Film Birth of a Nation

• Based on Thomas Dixons best-selling racist
  fiction
• First modern American film, 1915
• Huge audience

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Amos n Andy take racist images to radio
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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.

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White nationalists

• Blacks the enemy
• No rights, no land, no decent job
• No education
• James K. Vardaman of Mississippi

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Segregation

• Segregation an all encompassing system of white
  supremacy over blacks

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Segregations 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

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Segregation by custom

• blacks call at whites back door
• dont eat meals at the same table
• blacks cant try on clothes in stores
• blacks dont 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

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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 ballotTennessees
  Dortch law
• disqualification for petit crime

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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

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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

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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

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Economic Discrimination

• blacks safe only in jobs whites dont
  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

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Walt Disney Jim Crow
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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

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The Freedmens desire for literacy
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Tuskegee Institute at the founding in 1881
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Students made brick and built the campus
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Students earned room and board and learned useful
skills.
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The first new building impressed one and all and
fostered pride among students.
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Tuskegees purpose Training school teachers
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All-black faculty and staff at TI
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Tuskegee Institute Large, beautiful campus with
more than 20 impressive brick buildings
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G. W. Carver led the effort to educate black
farmers
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Jesup Agricultural Wagon
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Booker T. Washington a fund-raising genius
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BTWs Atlanta Exposition Addressracial peace,
room for blacks to maneuver
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BTW challenged ugly black stereotypes with his
writing as well as his speeches.
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Racial violence, like that in Wilmington, NC, in
1898, kept racial feelings harsh.
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New race atrocities, like the lynching and
burning of Sam Hose in Ga. In 1899 brought new
criticism of BTWs leadership.
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BTW and Theodore Roosevelt, a political
alliance, but eventually TR betrays Washington.
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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.
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The Atlanta riot of 1906 made BTWs 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.
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The challenge of WEB Du Bois, a complex story of
personal rivalry and mistrust.(Feb.23, 1868-
Aug. 27, 1963)
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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

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The Du Bois critique

• about 1901 he became more critical of BTWs
  educational program
• personal dispute. Railroad Case. Washington job.
• Talented Tenth--faith in the educated elite
• insisted on need for political power
• resentment of BTWs power with politicians,
  philanthropists
• advocated protest. Niagara Movement, 1905
• essentially in agreement with BTW up to 1901. For
  economic strategy, industrial education

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N
Years of worry and travel took their toll on
Booker T. Washingtons health. (April 5, 1856
November 14, 1915)
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One of BTWs great legacies, the 5000 Rosenwald
schools in the South.
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"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
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Mississippi Gov. Ross Barnett
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Confederate Pride at Ol Miss
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Edmund Pettus BridgeMarch 1965
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Martin Luther King Jr. Center for Peace and
Justice Atlanta Ga.
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M. L. King Jr. Ctr.
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