The Struggle for Black Equality

APUSH - Spiconardi

“Strange Fruit”Southern trees bear strange fruitBlood on the leaves and blood at the rootBlack bodies swinging in the southern breezeStrange fruit hanging from the poplar trees.

Pastoral scene of the gallant southThe bulging eyes and the twisted mouthScent of magnolias, sweet and freshThen the sudden smell of burning flesh.

Here is fruit for the crows to pluckFor the rain to gather, for the wind to suckFor the sun to rot, for the trees to dropHere is a strange and bitter crop.

Lynchings

Lynching murdering by a mob in order to intimidate, control, or otherwise manipulate a population of people

Lynchings

• In every year between 1883 and 1905, more than fifty persons were lynched in the South

• Estimates vary between 3,500 to 5,00o lynchings in the U.S.• Only one in

Canada, but perpetrated by Americans who crossed to border

The lynching of Allen Brooks in downtown Dallas, 1910.

Source: New York Times

Ida B. Wells

• Former slave who became a journalist who documented lynchings and a civil rights leader

• Writes the pamphlet, Southern Horrors: Lynch Law in All Its Phases

If it were possible, I would gather the race in my arms and fly away with them

Southern Horrors: Lynch Law in All Its Phases

But Thomas Moss, Calvin McDowell and Henry Stewart had been lynched in Memphis,…and they had committed no crime against white women. This is what opened my eyes to what lynching really was. An excuse to get rid of Negroes who were acquiring wealth and property…The more I studied the situation, the more I was convinced that the Southerner had never gotten over his resentment that the Negro was no longer his play thing…The federal laws for Negro protection passed during Reconstruction had been made a mockery by the South…

Source: Ida B. Wells, The Crusade for Justice, 1892

The lesson this teaches and which every Afro American should ponder well, is that 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. When the white man who is always the aggressor knows he runs as great a risk of biting the dust every time his Afro-American victim does, he will have greater respect for Afro-American life. 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.

Source: Ida B. Wells, Southern Horrors: Lynch Law in All Its Phases (1892)

Jim Crow

• Jim Crow System of racial segregation in the South named after a minstrel show character that lasted a century, from after the Civil War until the 1960s.

Jim Crow

• Disenfranchisement Laws– Grandfather Clause

• Allowed some uneducated whites the ability to vote

– Literacy Test– Poll Taxes

• Social Etiquette– A black male could not shake hands

with a white male because it implied being socially equal

– White motorists had the right-of-way at all intersections

– Under no circumstance was a black male to offer to light the cigarette of a white female -- that gesture implied intimacy

Plessy v. Ferguson (1896)

• Landmark Supreme Court case in which the constitutionality of racial segregation was upheld

• The Case– In 1890, Louisiana passed a law

requiring separate railway cars for blacks and whites

– In 1892, Homer Plessy, a man 1/8 black and 7/8 white boards a white only railcar. • He refuses to move to the black

railcar– Under Louisiana law, Plessy was

legally a black citizen

Plessy v. Ferguson (1896)

• The Ruling– Read the majority and

dissenting opinions– What arguments did each

side make?• Court rules 7 to 1 to

uphold Louisiana's law providing accommodations were equal

• “Separate but equal” How does this image compare to the reality of the event?