Discrimination Page 39 NCSCOS Goal 7

Voting Discrimination -literacy tests Limit the vote to those who could read (black and white) Would ask blacks harder questions than whites -poll taxes An annual tax to be paid before qualifying to vote Too poor to pay tax -grandfather clause To reinstate white voters Could vote if your grandfather could in 1867 (no blacks) To limit the freedman’s rights, especially in the South, Democratic leaders began passing literacy tests and poll taxes as a stepping stone to the polls. This also limited poor whites from voting. To protect them, they issued the grandfather clause, which stated that if your father or grandfather could vote on January 1, 1867, then you could vote. At that point, black people did not have the right to vote.

Segregation --Jim Crow laws Laws passed to segregate whites and blacks in public -segregation Legal separation of the races -Plessy v. Ferguson, 1896 separate but equal doctrine Institutionalized and legalized segregation

- Plessy v. Ferguson Majority Opinion - “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… Legislation is powerless to eradicate racial instincts or to abolish distinctions based upon physical differences, and the attempt to do so can only result in accentuating the difficulties of the present situation. If the civil and political rights of both races be equal one cannot be inferior to the other civilly or politically.” - Plessy v. Ferguson Majority Opinion - “The present decision...will not only stimulate aggressions, more or less brutal and irritating, upon the admitted rights of colored citizens, but will encourage the belief that it is possible, by means of state enactments, to defeat the beneficent purposes which the people of the United States had in view when they adopted the recent amendments of the Constitution.” -Plessy v. Ferguson Dissenting Opinion -

Informal rules and customs between blacks and whites Race Relations -racial etiquette Informal rules and customs between blacks and whites -lynching Mob killing without fair trial Ida B. Wells Fought nationwide struggle to end lynching and racial inequality -discrimination in the Northern cities also Between 1885 and 1900, more than 2500 African American men and women were shot, burned, or hanged without a trial in the South.

____________________________ Three of Ida B. Wells’s friends were lynched on March 9, 1892. The men had opened a store that successfully competed with a nearby white-owned store. The competition escalated into violence and the three black owners were arrested. Later, a white mob formed, grabbed the three men from the jail and killed them. Wells recognized lynching for what it was and began to denounce it in her local Memphis paper. The local white press began to call for her to be lynched. She moved to the north, where she continued her fight against lynching. ____________________________ “This is what opened my eyes to what lynching really was. An excuse to get rid of Negroes who were acquiring wealth and property and thus keep the race terrorized.” - Ida B. Wells -

~Booker T. Washington, Atlanta -Founded Tuskegee Institute Taught useful skills in agricultural, domestic, and mechanical work -gradual improvement was goal Let white people see value and achievement in blacks -economic equality first “To those of the white race…I would repeat what I say to my own race…Cast down your bucket among these people who have, without strikes and labor wars, tilled your fields, cleared your forests, built your railroads and cities, and brought forth treasures from the bowels of the earth…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.” ~Booker T. Washington, Atlanta

Acquire useful skills and prove value to whites Booker T. Washington vocational training Acquire useful skills and prove value to whites -Atlanta Compromise -Washington proposed that races could cooperate on certain economic issues while being separate in social issues

First black man to receive a PhD from Harvard W.E.B. DuBois -Harvard educated First black man to receive a PhD from Harvard -demanded full equal rights now -Niagara Falls Convention Encouraged blacks to seek a liberal arts education to have well-educated black leaders -helped found the NAACP Du Bois proposed that a group of educated blacks, the most “talented tenth” of the community, attempt to achieve immediate inclusion into mainstream American life. “We are Americans, not only by birth and by citizenship,” Du Bois argued, “but by our political ideals…And the greatest of those ideals is that ALL MEN ARE CREATED EQUAL.”

-Mexican seasonal workers Railroads, mining, agriculture Other Discrimination -Mexican seasonal workers Railroads, mining, agriculture Some forced into debt and sold into slavery to repay employers -continued resentment of the Chinese Fear of job competition pushed the Chinese into segregated schools and neighborhoods Chinese Exclusion Act (1882) Groups like the KKK would ensure racial segregation was upheld, not just in the South, but throughout the entire United States.

Booker T. Washington Former Slave Founded Tuskegee Institute Gradual Improvement Equality through Vocational Work “No race can prosper till it learns that there is as much dignity in tilling a field as in writing a poem.” WEB DuBois Middle class family in Mass. Graduated from Harvard Equality Now Equality through most talented citizens “The honor, I assure you, was Harvard’s.”