What is This [African] American, This New “Man”? Booker T’s Bucket vs. Dubois’s Talented Tenth

Reconstruction & “Jim Crow” 13 th 14 th & 15th Amendments –Enforced by army Civil Rights Act of 1866 –700,000 blacks register to vote vs. 600,000 whites –No blacks elected to governorship, no legislative majorities Republican majority abandons blacks, sides with big business & WASP elite Black Codes –Voters must be of “good character,” property owners, literate & pay poll tax –Cannot testify in court unless voter 1896 Supreme Court: Plessy vs. Ferguson –“separate but equal” –Jim Crow laws Lynchings

Anti-Negro Cultural War “ modern ethnologists have established the fact that in all essential qualities the Negro Race seems to be thoroughly incapable of development” –UC Berkeley anthropologist Joseph Le Conte, 1890 “there is no place in this land for the arrogant, aggressive, school-spoilt Afro American who wants to live without manual labor” –Tom Watson, early 20 th -century Georgia politician “the black man copulates solely for the gratification of the passion – for the erotic pleasure it affords him” –James K. Vardaman, Mississippi politician

Negro Labor or Negro Thought? Booker T. Washington ( ) “Cast down your bucket where you are” Accepts social & civil inequality w/o protest Loyalty to capitalism & its myths Vocational education more important than higher education –Tuskegee InstituteTuskegee Institute Up from Slavery (1901) W.E.B. DuBois ( ) Attacks Washington’s “compromise” –Denies basic rights –Builds no future –Destroys “manhood” Connects racism with critique of capitalism, U.S. imperialism Later, a socialist Souls of Black Folk (1903)

The Exodus Northward Eight million African Americans in 1900 –1/3-1/4 of southern U.S. population –90% still live in South –95% functionally illiterate, most from farm –Driven from skilled jobs in southern cities Enormous migration at beginning of 20 th C. –Expanding industry in NY, Chicago, Philadelphia, Cincinnati, Cleveland, D.C. – labor shortage Competition with whites & immigrants – new racism 2 nd generation Irish 12-24% white collar 2 nd generation black 7-9% Immigrant ghettos no more than 60% homogenous – black ghettos close to 100%