Up From Slavery

1
Up From Slavery

• The African-American Struggle for Equality in the
  Post-Civil War Era

2
The Hard Reality of Emancipation

• After the Civil War ended and the 13th Amendment
  abolished slavery (1865), freedmen found
  themselves without significant resources to start
  a new life
• The Freedmens Bureau (est. 1865) provided direct
  relief, education, jobs, and medical care in an
  effort to give freed slaves an opportunity to
  adjust to their new lives
• Despite such efforts, many blacks ended up as
  tenant farmers who engaged in sharecropping
  which involved pledging a share of their harvest
  as repayment to landowners who leased the land
  debt peonage often resulted as black farmers went
  into debt as a result of not being able to cover
  costs and debt owed to creditors

3
The Failure of Radical Reconstruction

• The Radical Republican attempt to re-engineer
  Southern society and politics (1865-77) failed
  due to
• terrorism - as practiced by the Ku Klux Klan and
  other white supremacist groups violence and
  intimidation kept reformers from carrying out
  Radical policies
• redemption Southern Democrats regained control
  of their state governments as a result of the
  Compromise of 1877, which (after the disputed
  election of 1876) gave Republican candidate Hayes
  the White House in exchange for a Republican
  pledge to withdraw the last federal troops from
  the South and end Reconstruction
• Jim Crow laws created institutionalized
  segregation through such measures as poll taxes,
  literacy tests, and grandfather clauses
  effectively disenfranchised blacks despite rights
  provided in the 14th and 15th Amendments

4
Thomas Nasts View of the Post-War South
5
The Supreme Court Limits Rights

• Ex parte Milligan (1866) the Court ruled that
  military courts could not try civilians where
  civil courts were functioning limited ability
  of the federal government to prosecute Southern
  whites who violated the law
• Slaughterhouse cases (1873) the Court created
  the concept of dual citizenship the idea that
  the 14th Amendment only guaranteed national civil
  rights, not state civil rights effectively
  limited the scope of 14th Amendment due process
  protections
• Civil Rights cases (1883) the Court further
  weakened the 14th Amendment by declaring that it
  protected only against government infringement of
  rights, not private infringement (i.e., private
  businesses could still discriminate against
  blacks)
• Plessy v. Ferguson (1896) ruled segregation
  legal as long as facilities were separate but
  equal not overturned until Brown v. Board of
  Education in 1954

6
Two Views of Progress

• Booker T. Washington, a former slave and the
  founder of Tuskegee Institute, argued that blacks
  would only gain acceptance by white society
  through education and hard work patterned after
  his own life experience
• Equality must first come on socio-economic terms
  and political equality would follow a popular
  approach with white Americans

• W.E.B. DuBois, a northern intellectual, argued
  that blacks must achieve political equality first
  before socio-economic equality would be fully
  achieved
• His approach was widely adopted by civil rights
  leaders in the 1950s/1960s
• DuBois helped to lead the Niagara movement and
  founded the NAACP