Henry Ford's anti-Semitic views echoed the fears and assumptions of many Americans in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Anti-Semitism in America saw a change in expression and virulence when increased immigration from Europe brought millions of Jews to the U.S. during Ford's childhood in the latter half of the 19th century. It reached its peak during the mid-1920s: a time when Ku Klux Klan membership had reached four million, Prohibition restricted alcohol consumption, and discriminatory immigration policies were enacted favoring immigrants from northern and western Europe over other parts of the world.

A close friend recalled a camping trip in 1919 during which Ford lectured a group around the campfire. He "attributes all evil to Jews or to the Jewish capitalists," the friend wrote in his diary. "The Jews caused the war, the Jews caused the outbreak of thieving and robbery all over the country, the Jews caused the inefficiency of the navy…“

In 1918, Henry Ford purchased his hometown newspaper, The Dearborn Independent. A year and a half later, he began publishing a series of articles that claimed a vast Jewish conspiracy was infecting America. The series ran in the following 91 issues. Ford bound the articles into four volumes titled "The International Jew," and distributed half a million copies to his vast network of dealerships and subscribers. The rhetoric was not unusual for its content, as much as its scope. As one of the most famous men in America, Henry Ford legitimized ideas that otherwise may have been given little authority.

Leo Max Frank (April 17, 1884 – August 17, 1915) was a Jewish-American factory superintendent whose murder conviction and extrajudicial hanging in 1915 by a lynch mob planned and led by prominent citizens in Marietta, Georgia, drew attention to questions of antisemitism in the U.S. He was posthumously pardoned in 1986 on technical grounds, without addressing the question of guilt or innocence.

An engineer and superintendent of the National Pencil Company in Atlanta, Frank was convicted on August 25, 1913, of the murder of one of his factory workers, 13-year-old Mary Phagan. She had been strangled on April 26 and was found dead in the factory cellar the next morning. Frank was the last person known to have seen her alive, and there were allegations that he had flirted with her before. His trial became the focus of powerful class, regional, and political interests. Raised in New York, he was cast as a representative of Yankee capitalism, a rich northern Jew lording it over vulnerable working women, as a historian put it. A former U.S. Representative  later used sensational coverage of the appeal process, one year after the trial, in his own publications to push for a revival of the Ku Klux Klan, calling Frank a member of the Jewish aristocracy who had pursued "Our Little Girl" to a hideous death. During the trial, Frank and his lawyers resorted to stereotypes, accusing another suspect — Jim Conley, a black factory worker who testified against Frank — of being especially disposed to lying and murdering because of his race.

On March 11, 1986, the Georgia State Board of Prisons and Paroles granted Frank a pardon, citing the state's failure to protect him or prosecute his killers. The names of Frank's murderers were well-known locally but were not made public until January 2000, the list includes several prominent citizens — a former governor, the son of a senator, a Methodist minister, a state legislator, and a former state Superior Court judge — their names matching those on Marietta's street signs, office buildings, shopping centers, and law offices today.

Segregation and Racism in America

THE JIM CROW ERA

Jim Crow LawsStarting in the 1890s, states throughout the South passed laws designed to prevent Black citizens from improving their status or achieving equality. These statutes, which together were known as Jim Crow, were in place and enforced until the 1950s and 60s.

After the Civil War:

The victors (the North) had to find a way to punish and rebuild the decimated south. Before the war their economy was collapsing due to the economic traditions of the south.

•Made new laws

•Divided up the states

•Sent the army in

SOUND FAMILIAR?! What happens to countries who are forced to make retributions (or anyone forced to do any thing?)

Where did it all begin?

Black CodesBlack CodesPurpose:

* Guarantee stable labor supply now that blacks were emancipated.

* Restore pre-emancipationsystem of race relations.

• Keep blacks out of power and in fear. Through voting requirements, subpar educations, and lack of legal rights

• Forced many blacks to become sharecroppers [tenant farmers].

Sharecropping is a system of agriculture in

which a landowner allows a tenant to use the land in return for a

share of the crops produced on the land. Sharecropping has a

long history.

The South had been devastated by war; planters had ample land but little money for wages or taxes. At the same time, most of the former slaves had labor but no money and no land; they rejected the kind of gang labor that typified slavery. The solution was the sharecropping system focused on cotton, which was the only crop that could generate cash for the croppers, landowners, merchants and the tax collector. Poor white farmers, who previously had done little cotton farming, needed cash as well and became sharecroppers.

Tenancy & the Crop Lien System

Tenancy & the Crop Lien SystemFurnishing Merchant Tenant Farmer Landowner

Loan tools and seed up to 60% interest to tenant farmer to plant spring crop.

Farmer also secures food, clothing, andother necessities oncredit from merchant until the harvest.

Merchant holds “lien” {mortgage} on part of tenant’s future crops as repayment of debt.

Plants crop, harvests in autumn.

Turns over up to ½ of crop to land owner as payment of rent.

Tenant gives remainder of crop to merchant inpayment of debt.

Rents land to tenant in exchange for ¼ to ½ of tenant farmer’s future crop.

How would a poor white farmer, who had been used to being socially and politically above

slaves, feel after sharing the same social status as

a freed black farmer?

"Come listen all you galls and boys,I'm going to sing a little song,

My name is Jim Crow.Weel about and turn about and do jis so,Eb'ry time I weel about I jump Jim Crow.“

- The song and dance of Rice, “black face”

Highly stereotypical and exaggerated Black figure that was subject to white humor.

Who is “Jim Crow”?

• Series of states’ laws passed throughout the nation (most notably in the South) aimed at separating the races.

• Separate facilities provided were always inferior, sometimes absolutely horrific.

What are Jim Crow Laws?

Education

Will you be granted the right to vote?Process:

1. Take off work to go register, potentially get fired. (Bosses who did not fire were harassed)

2. Fill out an application form, oaths you had to take were four pages long. You had to swear that your answers to every single question were true under penalty of perjury…the information you entered on the form would be passed on to the KKK.

3. Pass the literacy test.

4. If you pass and make it past these levels, you will be hunted down by the KKK and often lynched.

THIS WENT ON TILL THE CIVIL RIGHTS MOVEMENT OF THE 1960’S.

Take the Test…

The image of the Southern belle developed in the South during the Antebellum (before the war) Period. It was based on the young, unmarried woman in the plantation-owning upper class of Southern society. They were grace, fashion, participation in society, taking care of the house, with all the charm and femininity. Smart and well-spoken, sticking to proper etiquette at all times. Southern belles were taught at toddler age, how to walk, talk and behave in public with charm, grace and that quiet southern dignity that made her a southern belle. To the mentors of these young ladies, it was their way or no way. The mentors were strict, but fair, as they molded their daughters, granddaughters and nieces into the fair and disarming creations known as southern belles. Beautiful? Yes. Charming? Of course. Graceful in pubic. Wise in dealings. This, and other respected talents, helped to make the southern belle one of our most-enduring southern icons.

Lynching, scholar Jennie Leitweis-Goff argues in her book Blood at the Root, is central to American culture. The facts about lynching are well known to historians, but most people with a high school diploma in the U.S. don’t know a thing about it, because it’s generally not taught in K-12 curriculum.

The peak period of lynching in the U.S. was from 1882-1930 (note: after slavery and well into the 20th century), and estimates are that some 4,742 people have been lynched in the U.S. (through 1968). A few key points to keep in mind: lynching refers to any death outside due legal process and at the hands of a mob (many think it only refers to death by hanging, which is incorrect); white people were lynched, women (mostly black) were lynched, but by 1919 practice was reserved almost exclusively for black men; lynching happened in almost every state in the U.S. , but predominated in the South, because this is where most black people lived during that time; and, class played a role, as research indicates that the number of lynchings went up as cotton prices went down.  

White Women’s Complicity in the Practice of Lynching“‘White womanhood’ haunts lynching….,” Shawn Michelle Smith writes in her compelling book, Photography on the Color Line, She goes on in the chapter “The Spectacle of Whiteness,” to say this about lynching photography:

“[white womanhood]… is that phantom that is resurrected over and over again as a symbol of white racial purity defining the limits of the white lynch mob. …the figure of a threatened or raped white woman, evoked as the innocent victim of a ‘terrible crime,’ was conjured in attempts to justify lynching as the ‘understandable’ retribution of white fathers, brothers, and lovers. Ida B. Wells herself claimed to have believed this ideology at one time, before her extensive research revealed the cry of rape to be largely myth” (pp.129-30).

There are as many individual stories about lynchings as there are murdered black men (and women) in the historical record. This account, from Smith, about the lynching of Rubin Stacy, murdered in Fort Lauderdale, Flordia, on July 19,1935, captures the role of white women in inciting mob violence:

“According to the New York Times, as recorded in James Allen’s footnotes, [Rubin] Stacy, a homeless tenant farmer, had approached the home of Marion Jones [a white woman] to ask for food. On seeing Stacy, Jones screamed. Stacy was then arrested, and as he was being transported to a Miami jail by six deputies, a mob of over one hundred masked men seized and murdered him. Finally, Stacy’s corpse was hung in sight of Marion Jones’ home.” (p.130)

A white woman screamed, a black man died. This is the ‘logic’ of white supremacy. White womanhood, that ‘lily of the south’  had to be protected at all costs was the prevailing ideology. All an individual white woman like Marion Jones had to do to activate the network of white fathers, brothers, uncles and cousins who would come to her “defense” and murder a black man who was asking for help was scream.