Jim Crow America: A Documentary History

Jim Crow America

A Documentary History

EDITED BY

CATHERINE M. LEWIS AND J. RICHARD LEWIS

The University of Arkansas Press

Fayetteville

2009

Copyright © 2009 by Catherine M. Lewis and J. Richard Lewis

All rights reserved

Manufactured in the United States of America

ISBN-10: (cloth) 1-55728-894-1

ISBN-13: (cloth) 978-1-55728-894-3

ISBN-10: (paper) 1-55728-895-X

ISBN-13: (paper) 978-1-55728-895-0

17  16  15  14  13      6  5  4  3  2

Designed by Liz Lester

The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of the American National Standard for Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials Z39.48-1984.

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

Jim Crow America : a documentary history / edited by Catherine M. Lewis and J. Richard Lewis.

            p.     cm.

      Includes bibliographical references and index.

      ISBN-13: 978-1-55728-894-3 (cloth : alk. paper)

      ISBN-13: 978-1-55728-895-0 (pbk. : alk. paper)

      ISBN-10: 1-55728-894-1 (cloth : alk. paper)

      ISBN-10: 1-55728-895-X (pbk. : alk. paper)

      1. African Americans-—Segregation—History—Sources. 2. African Americans—Civil rights—History—Sources. 3. Racism—United States—History—Sources. 4. United States—Race relations—Sources. I. Lewis, Catherine M., 1967–  II. Lewis, J. Richard, 1936–

      E185.61.J527     2009

      305.896'073009041—dc22

2008045166

ISBN-13: 978-1-61075-213-8 (electronic)

For Betty Bishop Lewis,

wife and mother,

with all of our love,

now, and then

CONTENTS

Acknowledgments

Introduction

CHAPTER 1

Inventing Jim Crow

CHAPTER 2

Building Jim Crow

CHAPTER 3

Living Jim Crow

CHAPTER 4

Resisting Jim Crow

CHAPTER 5

Dismantling Jim Crow

APPENDIX 1:

Timeline

APPENDIX 2:

Discussion Questions

APPENDIX 3:

Sample Assignments

Annotated Bibliography

Index

About the Authors

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

This book, like all such projects, involved the assistance, hard work, and support of numerous people. We would like to begin by thanking Larry Malley, Julie Watkins, Brian King, Melissa King, and Thomas Lavoie at the University of Arkansas Press. Their enthusiasm and support for Jim Crow America has made the process all the more enjoyable.

Marie Stanton warrants special recognition as she took on the seemingly endless task of converting many of the documents into an electronic format for the second time. She played the same role in our first collaborative book, Race, Politics, and Memory, published by University of Arkansas Press in 2007 for the fiftieth anniversary of the desegregation of Central High School in Little Rock, Arkansas. This can often be a tedious and cumbersome process, and her diligence helped make this book possible.

Jeff Bridgers at the Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division helped us locate and download photographs from that vast collection. His continual good humor and support are much appreciated. Dr. Dana M. Sally, former dean of University Libraries, University of West Florida, and his staff were always helpful, patient, and accommodating in our search for documents. There are numerous individuals who helped us secure permissions to use many of the documents included in this volume, and they include India Artis (The Crisis), Rachel Leven (Foreign Affairs), Sheila Darryl (Central State University), Beth Howse (Fisk University), Judy Choi (University of Chicago Press), Tanya Milton (Savannah Tribune), Gail DaLoach and Steven W. Engerrand (Georgia Archives), Naomi Nelson (Manuscript, Archives, and Rare Book Library, Robert W. Woodruff Library, Emory University), Habiba Alcindor (The Nation), Marilyn Benaderet (The Afro-American Newspapers), and Gay Walker (Special Collections and Archives, Eric V. Hauser Memorial Library, Reed College). Finally, we would like to thank Karen Johnson for her fine work as copyeditor.

INTRODUCTION

While the exact origin of the term Jim Crow is unknown, most historians point to performer Thomas Dartmouth Daddy Rice’s 1832 song and dance by the same name as an early source. It became a common adjective by 1838, and Jim Crow law was first cited in the Dictionary of American English in 1904.¹ In popular culture, the Jim Crow farcical performance became a staple routine in minstrel shows, a popular form of entertainment in the nineteenth century.² Mark Twain said in an autobiographical reminiscence that the genuine nigger show, the extravagant nigger show was the show which has no peer and was a thoroughly delightful thing.³ Although blackface musical acts appeared as early as the 1790s, minstrel shows, with their crude parody of African American life, gained popularity in the 1840s. Stock characters such as Jim Dandy, Zip Coon, and Jim Crow (white actors with darkened faces) sang, shuffled, cavorted, and bantered in comic, stereotypical dialect. Remnants of their influence have been present in other media, notably the popular radio series Amos and Andy (1928) and the film The Jazz Singer (1927).⁴ Mainstream performers such as Judy Garland and Bing Crosby occasionally appeared in blackface. Even as minstrel shows waned, songs like Dixie, Blue Tail Fly, and Polly, Wolly, Doodle remain part of American popular culture.

Jim Crow has had multiple meanings and a dark and complex past, detailed by W. T. Lhamon in his book Jump Jim Crow. He explains that before the concept of ‘Jim Crow’ stood for America’s justly despised segregation laws, it first referred to a very real cross-racial energy and recalcitrant alliance between blacks and lower class whites. That’s what the trickster Jim Crow organized and represented: a working-class integration—a jumping, dizzy Jim Crow movement. And that’s what those who proposed segregation laws were determined to outlaw.⁵ After the Civil War, the term came to refer to the legal, customary, and often extralegal system that segregated and isolated African Americans from mainstream American life.

Over the past half-century, historians have debated the very nature of Jim Crow. C. Vann Woodward’s forgotten alternatives theory held that the years after the Civil War were a period of experimentation in Southern race relations before segregation took a firm hold. Others, such as Howard N. Rabinowitz, countered that African Americans were simply excluded from numerous aspects of public life; and before laws were passed (de jure), custom and tradition (de facto) ensured segregation in the post-war period.⁶ More recently, Jennifer Ritterhouse articulated the later position by arguing that before segregation was written into southern law in the 1890s and early 1900s, exclusion was the norm, making segregation something of an improvement for blacks.⁷ Both theories contribute to the understanding of the complex and often fluid nature of race relations in American life.

Contrary to popular opinion, Jim Crow laws did not originate in the South. Indeed, there was no need for such restrictions on black freedom in the region, as slavery provided ample control. The small numbers of free blacks were bound by similar strictures, with small modifications.⁸ Historian C. Vann Woodward argued that the very nature of the institution made separation of the races for the most part impractical. The mere policing of slaves required that they be kept under more or less constant scrutiny, and so did the exaction of involuntary labor. The supervision, maintenance of order, and physical and medical care of slaves necessitated many contacts and encouraged a degree of intimacy between the races unequaled, and often held distasteful, in other parts of the country. The system imposed its own type of interracial contact, unwelcome as it might be to both sides.⁹ The end of slavery, which had demanded a great degree of interracial intimacy, now demanded a stricter separation of the races in the South. But long after the end of the Civil War it was still possible to see integrated eating establishments and white infants suckled by African American nurses.¹⁰

In the urban North, interracial intimacy was uncommon, and most whites were committed to the notion of white supremacy and black inferiority.¹¹ Segregated housing was the norm, and competition for jobs brought restrictions regarding trades and professions, with many unions limiting apprenticeships and membership to whites only. Access to the courts as well as voting was severely limited, and other legal and extralegal restrictions on freedom were imposed. Leon F. Litwack’s book North of Slavery provides evidence that, by 1860, blacks were segregated on or excluded from railroad cars, steamboats, and stagecoaches and were restricted from restaurants, bars, lecture halls, hotels, and the like in almost all of the Northern and border states. They were even separated during communion in churches, as well as restricted to certain pews or the balcony.¹² Even Abraham Lincoln, who signed the Emancipation Proclamation in 1863, was a spokesman for the racist political consensus, stating: A universal feeling, whether well or ill-founded, can not be safely ignored. We can not, then, make them equals.¹³ As free blacks moved farther west, restrictions became more acute. The constitutions of Indiana, Illinois, and Oregon even limited the entrance of African Americans into their borders. Almost nowhere in the West, even in those places where he was allowed to settle, was the black man allowed to vote. Black and white women, of course, were denied this fundamental right. Those restrictions were common in the North as well.¹⁴

Inventing Jim Crow

At the end of the Civil War, Congress hotly debated and then passed, on December 18, 1865, the Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution, thus abolishing the peculiar institution throughout the United States and its jurisdictions.¹⁵ The federal government established military control of the South but took little immediate action as to the governance of the conquered states. That governance at the state and municipal levels was initially left in the hands of the leaders of the conquered region, and in some cases, like Tennessee and Louisiana, before the end of the war. With President Andrew Johnson’s approval, they were quick to establish conventions and, later, provisional legislatures. During Reconstruction, both the South and North struggled to reorder society to address the status of former slaves, whom they believed to be inferior and dangerous.¹⁶ An immediate concern was how to assure a ready supply of workers for the largely agricultural needs of the South. There was also a great deal of uncertainty about the new state of social relations. Mark M. Smith, in How Race Is Made, argues: As freedpeople began claiming rights to education and geographic movement, as they began to behave independently, so white southerners reacted by passing a series of Black Codes in 1865 and 1866.¹⁷ While the laws varied, each state included vagrancy laws (under which unemployed blacks could be hired out as forced labor), apprenticeship laws (under which children whom the courts deemed under improper care could be bound out to white employers), and severe limitations on black occupations and property holding.¹⁸

Mississippi, which had the largest black population in the South, established some of the first codes. The state forced blacks to enter into a yearlong contract, which stated that every Negro must have lawful home or employment, and shall have written evidence thereof.¹⁹ Failure to meet the terms of the contract resulted in harsh penalties, including arrest and indenture. It was often impossible to obtain new employment unless one could prove he or she had already been under such a contract. Failure to do so might lead one to be declared a vagrant.²⁰ By 1865, Mississippi had enacted restrictions on African Americans owning or leasing property outside towns. This essentially prevented them from farming independently, thus forcing them to seek employment on white farms and plantations. The laws in Mississippi were, in some cases, intentionally vague and open to interpretation; one could be accused of vagrancy for being a thief, drunkard, or pauper or for having given offense of speech and behavior.²¹ Mississippi was quickly copied by almost all the Southern states, as well as many Northern and Western ones, in passing laws forbidding marriage between blacks and whites.

Some towns and cities passed even more restrictive laws than those in Mississippi. The Louisiana towns of Opelousas and Franklin and the Parish of St. Landry had various ordinances preventing African Americans from renting or keeping a house if not already in possession by January 1. Additionally, blacks who lived in the country could not visit town without their employer’s permission. They were also restricted from selling anything without their employer’s or the mayor’s permission. These towns even required the evacuation of blacks not in the service of townspeople by 3:00 p.m. on Sunday.²² Of course, not every Southern town was as harsh, and the Black Laws varied in their punitive nature. For example, a law that provided some protection and justice for blacks was the apprentice law of South Carolina, but even it contained unfair regulations.²³

But freedmen and women were not completely abandoned. Established on March 3, 1865, and under the U.S. Department of War, the Freedmen’s Bureau was a controversial component of Reconstruction from its inception. Despised by the South, under-funded and partly neglected by the federal government, and poorly organized and managed, it still managed to provide some social services to freedmen and women. It built schools, hospitals, and churches and supervised the distribution of rations, clothing, and medicine. The Bureau also helped former slaves locate lost relatives and mediated some domestic disputes in its own court system. Perhaps it was most successful in preventing the South from establishing peonage through its review of labor contracts. Major General Oliver Howard, for whom Howard University was named, was a Civil War hero who served as the Bureau’s commissioner. Two years later, though, Congress ended funding for the Bureau’s work in all areas except education. Even that would shortly disappear. Despite its limited influence, the Bureau did briefly give African Americans an advocate at the federal level. But some of the policies of the Bureau and the military authorities supported or condoned certain Black Laws, providing tacit approval of the actions of the Southern legislatures.²⁴

Coverage in Northern newspapers, as well as pressure from Congress and military governors in the South, led to the nullification by 1867 of most of the Black Laws. This change helped set the stage for the ascension of the Radical Republicans (a group of American politicians who became a force in Congress in 1860) during Reconstruction.²⁵

Republican members of Congress, Union supporters, and journalists for Northern newspapers, such as Horace Greeley of the New York Tribune, debated and reported on conditions in the South and widespread abuse caused by the Black Laws. Reports of racially motivated violence, riots, and segregationist policies often made headlines. The forgiving policies of President Lincoln and, later, President Johnson, especially the mass amnesty granted to key Confederate figures such as Robert E. Lee and Alexander Stephens, angered members of the Radical Republicans, as those who came to take an even harsher attitude toward the South came to be known. The Thirty-Ninth Congress was prepared to act, and in the 1866–67 session many members refused to seat legislators from the Southern states. The Committee of Fifteen, mainly Republicans who opposed Johnson, advocated legislation reaffirming the role and power of both the Freedman’s Bureau and the Union forces in the South, which was passed by overriding a presidential veto. In April of 1866, Congress passed over a veto the Civil Rights Act, extending citizenship to all persons born in the United States and not subject to any foreign power . . . of every race and color, without regard to any previous condition of slavery, or involuntary servitude.²⁶ This became the basis for the Fourteenth Amendment (ratified on July 9, 1868).

Radical Republicans were soon in control of the direction of Reconstruction in the South and managed, in 1867, to pass a series of Reconstruction Acts that created five military districts under general officers. Johnson became less and less able to exert his influence in the matter of Reconstruction, and Radicals tried to impeach him for attempting to dismiss Secretary of War William Stanton and for other alleged misdeeds. However, the stridency of the Republicans’ attacks resulted in a failed vote. Still, by the end of 1868, and with the election of a Republican president, Civil War hero Ulysses S. Grant, the Radical agenda continued to prevail.

The status of freedmen and women remained one of the nation’s most pressing problems. While the passage of the Fourteenth Amendment overturned the Dred Scott decision, the issue of black suffrage was still being debated.²⁷ It was not until 1870, with the passage of the Fifteenth Amendment, which prohibited states or the federal government from using race, color, or previous status as a basis for voting, that blacks were afforded the right to vote. Though an important step, it did not prevent states from imposing literacy tests or poll taxes to severely restrict black suffrage. For the first time in American history, African Americans briefly played a significant role in the governance of the South. Elected at every level, local, state, and national, black men became judges, governors, and members of both houses of Congress. Despite popular legend—perpetuated by Southern newspapers and magazines well into the twentieth century and the writings of men like Charles Carroll (The Negro a Beast) and Thomas Dixon (whose The Clansman became the source for W. D Griffith’s film Birth of a Nation)—these officials were for the most part well-educated and temperate men.²⁸

For a brief period in American history, three groups exerted some influence over the South: freedmen, Northern immigrants (called carpetbaggers), and pro-Union Southerners (called scalawags). State constitutions were adopted in the new legislatures, and laws were passed with great debate and conflict. Conservative Democratic Southerners often withdrew from government, while Northern capital flooded into the region. But Southern resistance finally overpowered efforts to affect positive change in most of the former Confederate states. Through political maneuvering, intimidation, and violence, and Northern fatigue with the South and its problems, gradually the general tenor of Reconstruction changed.

Some important Supreme Court cases, such as the Slaughter-House Cases (1873), Strauder v. West Virginia (1880), Plessy v. Ferguson (1896), Williams v. Mississippi (1898), Cummings v. Richmond County Board of Education (1899), Giles v. Harris (1903), and Berea College v. Kentucky (1908), upheld the doctrine of separate but equal, effectively making Jim Crow the law of the land.²⁹ In his thoroughly researched examination of the court’s decisions from the Jim Crow era through the modern civil rights era, Michael J. Klarman states, the Court’s race decisions reflected, far more than they created, the regressive racial climate of the era.³⁰ This attitude was echoed in the writings of Democratic congressmen Frank Clark (A Politician’s Defense of Segregation), Thomas W. Hardwick (A Defense of Negro Disfranchisement), Episcopal Bishop Theodore DuBose Bratton (Christian Principals and the Race Issue), Robert Bennett Bean (The Negro Brain), Hubert Howe Bancroft (A Historian’s View of the Negro), and Howard Odum (Social and Mental Traits of the Negro).³¹ Magazines such as Harper’s Weekly, Scribner’s Monthly Magazine, and the Atlantic disseminated this school of thought broadly throughout the nation.

Reconstructionist state governments gradually became less and less able to resist the onslaught of the conservative Democrats, and by 1876 Reconstruction was effectively over. The contested presidential election of that year between Republican Rutherford B. Hayes and Democrat Samuel J. Tilden was resolved in Hayes’s favor when a deal was brokered, involving economic aid to the South and the withdrawal from Louisiana and South Carolina of the last of the federal troops. Power in the South transferred from the Radical Republicans to the Redeemers, the self-styled saviors of the South. The federal government largely abandoned African Americans, and the era of Jim Crow was just beginning.

It would be naive to assume the ascendancy of the Redeemers meant the immediate and complete establishment of Jim Crow in the South. C. Vann Woodward argues, in his seminal book The Strange Career of Jim Crow, that race relations after Redemption were an unstable interlude before the passing of these old and new traditions and the arrival of the Jim Crow code and disfranchisement.³² In some cases, housing patterns in the South remained mixed, black suffrage was still practiced, and some African Americans still held office at the local and state level. In addition, transportation systems were not yet fully segregated. Charles E. Wynes points out that the most distinguishing factor in the complexity of social relations between the races was that of inconsistency. From 1870 to 1900, there was no generally accepted code of racial mores and at no time was it the general demand of the white populace that the Negro be disfranchised and white supremacy made the law of the land.³³

White supremacy was further institutionalized and perpetuated by what historian Jennifer Ritterhouse calls racial etiquette—a series of social practices imposed by whites on blacks to maintain their ascendancy.³⁴ Customs varied from place to place, but most included such practices as requiring all blacks, regardless of age, to address whites as Mister, Missus, Miss, or some variant such as Missy, Young Master, or Boss. These honorifics, except in a few cases such as Doctor or Professor, were denied to African Americans. Most were addressed as Boy, Uncle, or Auntie, if not by their first name. Failure to answer whites without a Yes, sir or Yes, ma’am was taken as an offense. This held true for eye contact for an extended period of time or failing to yield the sidewalk to a white person. An African American man who spoke to a white woman ran the risk of being accused of being uppity or, worse, of having sexual intentions. Arguing with whites, especially in an angry voice, was a serious breech of etiquette that in some cases could be fatal. While whites readily accepted food cooked by African Americans, to eat at the same table was taboo. Black children were taught at a young age that such racial etiquette was not a reflection of good manners but a strategy that might save one’s life.³⁵

Southern politicians of this era could roughly be divided into three groups. The least influential were the liberals, whose position was best articulated by former Confederate officer and popular author James Branch Cabel and Virginia aristocrat Lewis Harvie Blair, who argued for equal rights and protection for all citizens. The second group, the conservatives (or Redeemers), received broad support in the South and argued that liberals were false friends to African Americans, raising expectations that could never be met. Best represented by South Carolina’s Wade Hampton, the Redeemers took, at most, a paternalistic attitude toward African Americans.³⁶ The third group were the Populists, an odd mix of agrarians, working-class whites, and artisans who billed themselves as exponents of a new realism on race, free of the delusions of doctrinaire and sentimental liberalism on the one hand, and the illusions of romantic paternalism on the other.³⁷ Tom Watson, their foremost spokesman, once said: Gratitude may fail; so may sympathy, and friendship, and generosity, and patriotism, but, in the long run, self-interest always controls. Let it once appear plainly that it is to the interest of the colored man to vote with the white man and he will do it.³⁸ Before too long, all three groups had lost much of their influence. The liberals gained no more than a toehold in Southern politics; the ruling conservatives, after a spate of widespread acts of corruption and their perceived alliances with Northern industrialists at the expense of the agrarians, lost much of their political power; and the Populists, never able to overcome their true aversion to blacks and seeking other political alliances, finally lost almost all of their influence. The reality is that the attitudes and beliefs of the lowest element of Southern society (often called Crackers) would come to dominate Southern racial policies for the next seventy years.

Building and Living Jim Crow

An editor in the 1898 issue of the Charleston News and Courier, in arguing against the establishment of Jim Crow laws on railroads in his state, laws that had already swept most of the Southern states to the west, ironically said, If there must be Jim Crow cars on the railroads, there should be Jim Crow cars on the street railways. Also on all passenger boats. . . . If there should be Jim Crow cars, moreover, there should be Jim Crow waiting saloons at all stations, and Jim Crow eating houses. . . . There should be Jim Crow sections of the jury box, and a separate Jim Crow dock and witness stand in every court—and a Jim Crow Bible for colored witnesses to kiss. It would be advisable also to have a Jim Crow section in county auditor’s and treasure’s offices for the accommodation of colored taxpayers. . . . There should be a Jim Crow department for making returns and paying for the privileges and blessing of citizenship. Perhaps the best plan would be . . . establishing two or three Jim Crow counties at once, and turning them over to our colored citizens for their special and excusive accommodations.³⁹ Confident that this reductio ad absurdum had dealt the railroad matter a telling blow, the editor must have rested on this accomplishment. Regrettably, after a short while, all those absurd things came to pass, except for the establishment of Jim Crow counties. After a few years, the same newspaper was applauding the fact and urging additional Jim Crow legislation.

What happened was not that the South had new convictions of extreme racism that were now becoming law and practice, but that the forces that had kept them in check were now largely absent. Hatred, fear, and fanaticism had always been present in the South, but the forces that restrained them—moderate Southern opinion, liberal Northern opinion, the nationwide press, the courts, the federal government—were now largely absent from the scene.

Not only were Jim Crow practices realized in the laws and statutes enacted at the local and national level, but the decisions of the Supreme Court had a profound effect on shaping the practices of segregation. Furthermore, America’s Republican-led imperialistic efforts in places like the Philippines and Cuba, with the conquest of millions of people of the lesser races, made protection of American inferiors even less of an imperative. The Boston Evening Transcript admitted in 1899 that Southern race policy was now the policy of the Administration of the very party which carried the country into and through a civil war to free the slave.⁴⁰

By 1900, the near-total disfranchisement of blacks through legal and non-legal means was complete. Access to the legal system was denied or severely restricted. African Americans were separated or denied access on railroads and steamships and in hotels, restaurants, and places of entertainment and restricted to separate unions and working conditions. Housing was restricted, and many were prevented from entering certain cities and towns. Prisons, hospitals, and homes for the indigent were likewise segregated to a degree never before known in the South. Racially motivated violence and brutality was commonplace, most but not all within the borders of the South. Lynchings throughout the nation numbered 2,929 between 1882 and 1918, with no end in sight.⁴¹ Two events in 1915—the rebirth of the Ku Klux Klan on Stone Mountain in Georgia and the nationwide acclaim of D. W. Griffith’s film Birth of a Nation—signaled the nearly complete embrace of this racial status quo.

Jim Crow found a powerful advocate in the Virginia-born and Georgia-raised president in 1912. Woodrow Wilson’s overtly racist views and almost entirely southern cabinet promoted Jim Crow; the postmaster general, Treasury Department, and navy all ordered that their offices be segregated. Wilson segregated Washington, D.C., and began requiring that applicants for government job submit photographs. When confronted by black leaders, Wilson replied: The purpose of these measures was to reduce the friction. It is as far as possible from being a movement against the Negroes. I sincerely believe it to be in their interest.⁴² The House of Representatives, during Wilson’s first term, passed a law that made intermarriage a felony in D.C.

Film, newspapers, and magazines in the early twentieth century embraced the theories of racial superiority as a justification for Jim Crow, reflecting Wilson’s views. Thomas Dixon’s novel The Clansman became the basis for D. W. Griffith’s popular 1915 film Birth of a Nation. To ensure the film’s widespread distribution and to give his ideology credibility, Dixon held a private screening for Wilson, his former classmate at Johns Hopkins, at the White House. Wilson is alleged to have reacted with the words, It is like writing history with lightning; my only regret is that it is so terribly true.⁴³ Dixon held similar screenings for Supreme Court justices and members of Congress.⁴⁴ Dixon’s was not the only voice. Historians like Robert W. Schufeldt, who published The Negro: A Menace to American Civilization in 1907, also found wide readership.

Resisting Jim Crow

African Americans in the North and South were not passively watching these new developments; they vigorously criticized the racist laws and responded by establishing new institutions and organizations. In response to the increasing loss of the rights of citizenship and the rising tide of violence, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP, first called the National Negro Committee) was founded in 1909.⁴⁵ The influential educator W.E.B. Du Bois served as editor of its magazine, the Crisis. The NAACP largely rejected Tuskegee Institute founder Booker T. Washington’s accommodationist stance, popularized during his Atlanta Compromise speech of 1895: 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.⁴⁶ The 360,000 black men who returned from World War I expected to be recognized for their sacrifices, despite being forced to serve in segregated units with almost no black officers. Instead, they faced violence and intimidation; some were even lynched in their uniforms. Especially alarming were the race riots of 1919’s Red Summer in cities like Chicago, Houston, Little Rock, Harlem, New York, Baltimore, New Orleans, and Washington, D.C.

Numerous African American leaders lent their voices to protesting the economic, political, and social strictures of Jim Crow. Born to slavery in Mississippi, Ida B. Wells became an early and vocal opponent of segregation. In 1884, foreshadowing the action that would catapult Rosa Parks into the national spotlight, Wells refused to vacate her seat in a railroad car. Three men forcibly ejected her. She later founded the Memphis newspaper Free Speech and worked tirelessly for the rest of her life against lynching. It is in this area that she had the most influence, publishing important books and pamphlets such as Southern Horrors: Lynch Law in All Its Phases (1892), A Red Record: Tabulated Statistics and Alleged Causes of Lynchings in the United States, 1892–1893–1894 (1895), and Mob Rule in New Orleans: Robert Charles and His Fight to Death, the Story of His Life, Burning Human Beings Alive, Other Lynching Statistics (1900). Like Wells, A. Phillip Randolph was among the most aggressive and accomplished civil rights leaders of this era. An early organizer of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, he organized the 1941 March on Washington, which resulted in President Franklin Delano Roosevelt issuing the Fair Employment Act for defense industries. Randolph played a crucial