African Americans in the Progressive Era

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African Americans in the Progressive Era
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• Easily the most striking thing in the history of
  the America Negro since 1876 is the ascendancy of
  Mr. Booker T. Washington. W.E.B. Du Bois
• No exaggeration.
• At this point in time, Washington yielded more
  power than any other African-American between
  Douglass and King.

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Booker T. Washington
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• Born April 5, 1856
• Burroughs farm at the community of Hales Ford,
  VA
• Died November 14, 1915
• In Tuskegee, after collapsing in New York City
  and being brought home.
• Booker T. Washington was a slave until he was 9
  years old (slave mother, white father).
• Worked in salt furnaces and coal mines in WV for
  several years
• Educated at Hampton Institute and Wayland
  Seminary.
• 1881 became the first leader of Tuskegee
  Institute.
• 1900 organized the National Negro Business League

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Up From Slavery An Autobiography (1901)
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Booker T. Washington's house at Tuskegee
University
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• the importance of hard work, savings, home
  equity, and family, maintaining that while
  political and social equality for blacks was
  important, it was not as essential as uplifting
  their own communities, the top priority before
  going on to other goals.

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• Gave The Atlanta Cotton States and International
  Exposition Speech
• September 11, 1895
• Washington began with a call to the blacks, to
  join the world of work.
• He believed that African-Americans should
  concentrate all their energies on industrial
  education, and accumulation of wealth, and the
  conciliation of the South.
• W.E.B. Du Bois gave it the title of "Atlanta
  Compromise"
• Du Buois believed it was insufficiently committed
  to the pursuit of social and political equality
  for Blacks.
• Go slow accommodation.

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• He addressed the inequality between commercial
  legality and social acceptance, proclaiming that
  "The opportunity to earn a dollar in a factory
  just now is worth infinitely more than the
  opportunity to spend a dollar in an opera house."
  However, Washington also endorsed segregation by
  claiming that blacks and whites could exist as
  separate fingers of a hand.
• Atlanta Address of 1895

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• At the bottom of education, at the bottom of
  politics, even at the bottom of religion, there
  must be for our race economic independence.

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Tuskegees Most Famous
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W.E.B. Du Bois
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• Born February 23, 1868
• Great Barrington, MA
• Died August 27, 1963
• Ghana (West Africa)
• Education
• Fisk University, B.A. 1888
• Harvard University, Ph.D. 1896
• First African American to earn Ph.D. at Harvard.
• Studied at the University of Berlin
• Taught at
• Wilberforce College (Ohio)
• University of Pennsylvania
• Philadelphia Negro Project
• Atlanta University (now Clark Atlanta)
• Established sociology department
• Father of Pan-Africanism

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Of Washington

• Acknowledged Washingtons influence but
  criticized his preaching a gospel of work and
  money to such an extent as apparently almost
  completely to overshadow the higher aims of life.

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• Political and social equality were a prerequisite
  for economic independence.
• The Talented Tenth.
• The problem of the twentieth century is the
  problem of the color line.

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The Talented Tenth (Du Bois, 1903)

• Du Bois envisioned a focused effort to educated a
  portion of the United States black populationas
  a way to lift up the standing of black Americans.
  
• How then shall the leaders of a struggling people
  be trained and the hands of the risen few
  strengthened? There can be but one answer The
  best and most capable of their youth must be
  schooled in the colleges and universities of the
  land. We will not quarrel as to just what the
  university of the Negro should teach or how it
  should teach it I willingly admit that each
  soul and each race-soul needs its own peculiar
  curriculum. But this is true A university is a
  human invention for the transmission of knowledge
  and culture from generation to generation,
  through the training of quick minds and pure
  hearts, and for this work no other human
  invention will suffice, not even trade and
  industrial schools.

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The Souls of Black Folk (1903)
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• It is much more difficult in theory than
  actuality to say the
• last goodbye to ones loved ones and friends and
  to all
• the familiar things of this life.
• I am going to take a long, deep and endless
  sleep. This
• is not a punishment but a privilege to which I
  have looked
• forward for years.
• I have loved my work. I have loved people and
  my play
• but always I have been uplifted by the thought
  that what
• I have done well will live long and justify my
  life that
• what I have done ill or never finished can now be
  handed
• on to others for endless days to be finished,
  perhaps
• better than I could have done. And that peace
  will be my
• applause.
• One thing alone I charge you as you live and
  believe in
• life. Always human beings will live and progress
  to
• greater, broader and fuller life. The only
  possible death

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• The World of Jim Crow

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The Niagara Movement

• 1905
• 1908

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• Civil Rights group.
• Organized by W.E.B. DuBois and William Monroe
  Trotter.
• After being denied admittance to hotels in
  Buffalo, New York, the group of 29 business
  owners, teachers, and clergy who comprised the
  initial meeting gathered at Niagara Falls, from
  which the groups name derives.
• Considered the precursor to the NAACP.  

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The Birth of the NAACP

• National Association for the Advancement of
  Colored People

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• Founded Feb. 12. 1909
• It is the nation's oldest, largest and most
  widely recognized grassrootsbased civil rights
  organization.

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• The NAACP was formed partly in response to the
  continuing horrific practice of lynching and the
  1908 race riot in Springfield, Illinois.
• Appalled at the violence that was committed
  against blacks, a group of white liberals issued
  a call for a meeting to discuss racial justice.
• Mary White Ovington
• Descendant of abolitionists
• Oswald Garrison Villard
• Descendant of abolitionists
• William English Walling
• Dr. Henry Moscowitz
• Some 60 people, seven of whom were African
  American (including W. E. B. Du Bois, Ida B.
  Wells-Barnett and Mary Church Terrell), signed
  the call, which was released on the centennial of
  Lincoln's birth.

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The Founders
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Mary White Ovington
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Oswald Garrison Villard
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William English Walling
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Dr. Henry Moscowitz
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Dr. W.E.B. Du Bois
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Founding Members

• Arthur and Joel Spingarn
• Josephine Ruffin
• Mary Talbert
• Inez Milholland
• Jane Addams
• Florence Kelley
• Sophonisba Breckinridge
• John Haynes Holmes
• Mary McLeod Bethune
• George Henry White
• Charles Edward Russell
• John Dewey
• William Dean Howells
• Lillian Wald
• Charles Darrow
• Lincoln Steffens
• Ray Stannard Baker
• Fanny Garrison Villard

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• The NAACP's stated goal was to secure for all
  people the rights guaranteed in the 13th, 14th,
  and 15th Amendments to the United States
  Constitution, which promised an end to slavery,
  the equal protection of the law, and universal
  adult male suffrage, respectively.

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The Magazine
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Tuscaloosa Chapter PresidentDeloris Warrick
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Alabama Chapter PresidentEdward Vaughn
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Current ChairmanJulian Bond
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Marcus Garvey
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• MAN KNOW THYSELF For man to know himself is for
  him to feel that for him there is no human
  master. For him Nature is his servant, and
  whatsoever he wills in Nature, that shall be his
  reward. If he wills to be a pigmy, a serf or a
  slave, that shall he be. If he wills to be a real
  man in possession of the things...

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• He founded the Universal Negro Improvement
  Association (UNIA) in August 1914 as a means of
  uniting all of Africa and its diaspora into "one
  grand racial hierarchy."
• Came to the United States in March 1916 after
  corresponding with Booker T. Washington
• Purpose was to raise funds for a school like
  Tuskegee in Jamacia.

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Garveyism

• The fundamental focus is the complete, total and
  never ending redemption of the continent of
  Africa by people of African ancestry, at home and
  abroad.
• It is rooted in one basic idea "whatsoever
  things common to man that man has done, man can
  do".
• Therefore, Africa can become as glorious and
  profoundly advanced in the scientific and
  technological realm as any, when Africans will it
  to be.
• The tenets of Garveyism are
• race first
• self-reliance
• nationhood
• The ultimate goal of Garveyism is a United States
  of Africa which will protect the interests of
  Black people worldwide.

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A Back to Africa Movement

• Sought to develop Liberia.
• The Liberia Program
• launched in 1920
• abandoned in the mid-1920s after much opposition
  from European powers with interests in Liberia.
• Didnt want to take all blacks back to Africa.
• "We do not want all the Negroes in Africa. Some
  are no good here, and naturally will be no good
  there."

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Its Demise

• November 1919.
• Some say a witch hunt by the Bureau of
  Investigation.
• The accusation centered on the fact that the
  corporation had not yet purchased a ship with the
  name "Phyllis Wheatley". Although one was
  pictured with that name emblazoned on its bow on
  one of the company's stock brochures, it had not
  actually been purchased by the BSL and still had
  the name Orion.
• When the trial ended on 23 June 1923, Garvey had
  been sentenced to five years in prison.
• After numerous attempts at appeal were
  unsuccessful, he was taken into custody and began
  serving his sentence at the Atlanta Federal
  Penitentiary on 8 February 1925.
• Sentence was eventually commuted by President
  Coolidge.
• Upon release in November 1927, he was deported to
  Jamaica.

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