1. Race Relations in the Gilded Age

2. Resistance and Repression
After Reconstruction, most African Americans were sharecroppers
Many of them joined the Populist Party, which angered white Democrats who turned to racist tactics to win the support of poor whites
By 1890 election officials in the south began using methods to make it difficult for Blacks to vote

3. Disfranchising African Americans
Southern states used loopholes to impose voting restrictions on Blacks
Poll taxes
Literacy tests
Grandfather clause
Southern states passed laws that enforced segregation in public places
Called “Jim Crow Laws”

4. Disfranchising African Americans
In 1883 the Supreme Court overturned the Civil Rights Act of 1875
The Supreme Court ruling in Plessey vs. Ferguson legalized “separate but equal” facilities
Violence against Blacks increased
Between 1890 and 1899, hundreds of lynchings took place in the south.

5. Disfranchising African Americans

6. African American Response
In 1892 Ida B. Wells began an anti-lynching crusade
She wrote newspaper articles and a book denouncing lynchings and mob violence against Blacks
Booker T. Washington urged fellow African Americans to concentrate on achieving economic goals rather than political ones.
He explained his views in a speech known as the Atlanta Compromise

7. African American Response

8. African American Response
W. E. B. duBois challenged the Atlanta Compromise
He believed that African Americans had to demand their rights, especially voting rights in order to gain full equlaity