African American Rights Research Articles

‘Slavery Dies Hard’: A Radical Perspective on the Morant Bay Rebellion in Jamaica

ABSTRACT After playing a leading role in opposing Jamaica's largely white plantocracy and the island's English governor, both as a journalist and a politician, mixed-race Jamaican Robert A. Johnson (1825–1899) migrated to New York in July 1865, where he joined the editorial staff of the New York Tribune. A few months later, news reached New York of an outbreak in Morant Bay and the violent government suppression that followed. Johnson covered these events from New York, with deep personal knowledge of Jamaica and an ability to read against the grain of the newspaper accounts arriving by steamship. This article recovers Johnson's body of writing on Jamaica published in the Nation, the Evening Post, the New York Tribune, and Hours at Home in 1865–1866 and locates it within a public debate then taking place about what lessons should be drawn from Jamaica for race relations in America. Pointing to the legal mechanisms of planter power, Johnson warned his readers, ‘the whole of this bloody affair … shows also how unsafe it is to intrust the keeping of negro rights to the hands of men bred in the school of slavery or inheriting its traditions.’

Four Poems from Langston Hughes's Spanish Civil War Verse

Langston Hughes traveled to Spain in 1937, during that Country's Civil War. He saw the Republic's Fight against Franco as an international fight against fascism, racism, and colonialism and for the rights of workers and minorities. Throughout the 1930s, Hughes organized for justice, at home and abroad, often engaging with communist and other left political organizations, like the Communist Party USA's John Reed Club, the League of Struggle for Negro Rights, and the International Workers' Order (Rampersad,Life236, 286, 355; Scott). When the war in Spain began, in 1936, workers and intellectuals who were engaged on the left came from around the world to fight against Franco's forces; these volunteers, the International Brigades, included approximately 2,800 Americans known as the Abraham Lincoln Brigade, of which about ninety were African American (Carroll vii; “African Americans”). Hughes went to Spain to interview black antifascist volunteers in the International Brigades and write about their experiences for theBaltimore Afro-American, VolunteerforLiberty,and other publications. Much of Hughes's writing from Spain sought to explain to people at home why men and women, and African diasporic people especially, had risked their lives to fight in Spain. Hughes profiled African Americans fighting for the first time alongside white comrades in the International Brigades, including Ralph Thornton, Thaddeus Battle, and Milton Herndon (“Pittsburgh Soldier Hero,” “Howard Man,” “Milt Herndon”). In addition to writing articles, he wrote poetry, gave radio speeches, and translated poems and plays from Spanish into English. Much of Hughes's work from the Spanish Civil War has been collected in anthologies. However, so prolific was Hughes, and so fastidious was he in saving drafts and ensuring they reach his collection at Yale University's Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, that many unpublished works exist in archives. The four poems here represent different poetic registers and levels of polish, and they illuminate the dynamic range of Hughes's literary production during his time in Spain.

The Paradox of Oregon's Progressive Politics: The Political Career of Walter Marcus Pierce

ROBERT R. MCCOY The Paradox of Oregons Progressive Politics The PoliticalCareer of Walter Marcus Pierce IF ASKED TO NAME INFLUENTIAL state politicians, Oregoniansmight mention the names of Harry Lane, Charles McNary, William U'Ren, or Tom McCall. Walter M. Pierce, however, would likely not be on the list.As an undergraduate, I spent many hours at the card catalog and in the book stacks of Eastern Oregon State College's Pierce Library, named afterCorne liaMarvin Pierce and her husband Walter Marcus Pierce. Despite being a history major, I knew little about either Pierce ? only that Walter was the one-time governor of Oregon and, rumor had it,an active Ku Klux Klan member during his lifetime. Later, I learned about Pierce's complex political life and themany legacies leftby this consummate Oregon politician. Walter M. Pierce's political career spanned fifty-six years, from 1886 to 1942.Over those decades, he held numerous elected offices inOregon: county recorder, state legislator, governor, and U.S. congressman. In addition tohis wide-ranging experience as a politician, Pierce participated in some of the most influential political and social movements of his time, ranging from Populism and Progressivism to eugenics and prohibition. Much debate has surrounded Pierce's political career, especially concerning his connections to theKu Klux Klan, because his life and political activities illuminate the contradictions that existed within the liberal-progressive political tradition in theUnited States during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.1 These contradictions aremainly products of late twentieth and twenty-first century interpretive stances, created as we try to understand how people could have supported efforts to democratize the political process and limit the excesses of themarketplace while at the same timeworking to curb the OHQ vol. no, no. 3 ? 2009 Oregon Historical Society This portrait of WalterMarcus Pierce was taken inAugust 1926,during his lastyear as Governor ofOregon. At age sixty-five, Pierce was campaigningfor reelection. During his tenureas governor,Pierce had survived recallefforts, unsuccessfully pushed for tax reform, and sufferedthe lossofhiswife tocancer in 1925. McCoy, The Political Career of Walter Marcus Pierce 391 political and economic rights ofAfrican Americans and Japanese and Chi nese immigrants, exerting a paternalistic moral vision of reform through the implementation of prohibition, and seeking to create a racially pure society through eugenics. Governor of Oregon, New Deal Democrat, populist and progressive, advocate of eugenics and birth control, prohibitionist, and ardent racist, Pierce exemplifies a period of political and social movements that sought to reshape theAmerican Republic. Perhaps the best way to understand these contradictions is through the category of populist politics as defined by historians Robert Johnston and Nancy MacLean. Johnston describes one side of the coin, asserting that the middle class during the Progressive Era created a "radical democratic popu lism" that propelled much progressive political change inOregon and the United States.2 Describing the other side of the coin,MacLean uses the term "reactionary populism" tounderstand the enormous middle class attraction to the Ku Klux Klan during the 1920s.3 Individuals like Pierce, who was of themiddle class, existed inboth categories, often simultaneously supporting democratization and economic equality alongside limitations on certain groups' access to such enfranchisement. My understanding of Pierce's middle-class radical-democratic popu lism and reactionary populism isbased on Johnston's interpretation of the middle class in early twentieth century Portland. He contends thathistorical scholarship has consistently constructed themiddle class "as a unitary and ahistorical category or entity instead of a product of constant political and cultural struggle." For Johnston, there is "no such entity as theAmerican middle class." Instead, contrary to the portrayal of "middling folks" as con servative and monolithic, Johnston asserts that "people in themiddle have created one of America's most democratic political traditions, a populism that has often represented a radical challenge to the authority of economic, political, and cultural elites and that has called into question many of the fundamental assumptions of a capitalist society."According to Johnston, the middle class (ormiddling classes) is a flexible category,worked out through politics, because "politics alwaysmakes class concepts meaningful in society."4 Johnston'smiddling classes comprised members of thepetit bourgeoisie, the working class, and farmers in varying and shifting coalitions. For...

Jean Toomer and Cane : “Mixed-Blood” Impossibilities

Jean Toomer and Cane: “Mixed-Blood” Impossibilities Gino Michael Pellegrini (bio) Even though Jean Toomer was black and white, his fascination with miscegenation in his hybrid short-story cycle Cane (1923) was puzzling and untimely. Joel Williamson writes that by 1915 the one-drop rule had been accepted by both blacks and whites in the North and South (109). Hence, mixed bloods with visible traces of blackness, including members of the former mulatto elite, would be judged as black by both blacks and whites. At best, they could be “in some way, satisfyingly black” (153). In this article, I put forward a reading of Toomer and Cane that explains his fascination with miscegenation in terms of his hope for what was possible in America. Specifically, his unique and solitary position vis-à-vis the New Negro in Black Washington and the Young American in White Manhattan provided him with the reasons, models, and ideals to believe that, in Cane, he could effectively voice and sketch out a mixed race sensibility and community that would be grasped and appreciated by the American public. However, in the process of writing Cane, he came face to face with the rigid categories and limits of the black-white color line in the Jim Crow era, which rendered unintelligible and unsustainable in the culture at large the mixed race sensibility and community he sought to express and develop. In other words, we see in Cane the ultimately futile clash of Toomer’s Young American ideals with the socio-political realities of the black-white color line. Cane reveals the pain and frustration of this clash through muffled and ambivalent narrative voices, and through sketches of unacknowledged, crippled, misunderstood, and lost mixed race protagonists. [End Page 1] Jean Toomer between 1918 and 1923: Contingency, Politics, and the Promise of Art In their book Jean Toomer and the Terrors of American History, Charles Scruggs and Lee VanDemarr contend that the Toomer who wrote Cane should be read first and foremost as a political writer, although it is true that by end of 1924 he had embraced the spiritual teachings of George Gurdjieff to such an extent that he “could no longer identify with the material that had inspired [Cane]” (Larson 22), and would henceforth eschew black identity. Gurdjieff was an Eastern European mystic of mysterious origin who eventually settled in France. Toomer was so swayed by Gurdjieff’s notion of spiritual wholeness that he actually became his disciple and traveled to France for advanced training (38). This significant turn of events in Toomer’s life has led many critics to read Cane as a kind of spiritual autobiography in which Toomer utilizes modernist form and narrative techniques in an attempt to transcend the polarities of racial categorization and achieve spiritual wholeness. However, critics who read Toomer strictly as a modernist and/or spiritualist tend to overlook connections between Cane and his early political writings. His belief in socialism and support for Negro rights are evident in “Reflections on the Race Riots,” an article about the Washington D.C. race riots of 1919, which Scruggs republished in the Arizona Quarterly alongside Toomer’s other pre-Cane political writings that originally appeared in the socialist newspaper, The New York Call. In this article, Toomer defends the Negroes who rioted in reaction to Washington police brutality. He refers to them as “difficult to exploit,” and attributes “race prejudice” to the “economic structure” and class exploitation. Added to this, he presents socialism both as a means to explain the plight of the Negro and as the one and only political system that can reform a racist nation (Scruggs 121). In 1919, The Nation also published two letters that Toomer wrote to the editor, one regarding socialism and the other regarding Negro rights (Letters 1–3). His decision to voice his socialist and pro-Negro views in print was not without precedent either. He was intimately familiar with the political arena and with the role of being a public representative of the black masses and a defender of their civil rights inasmuch as he was raised by his grandfather, P. B.S. Pinchback, and his wife in their Washington D.C. home. Pinchback...

Anti-US Imperialism as Assertion of Black Subjectivity at the Turn of the Last Century

US imperialism of the Philippines at the turn of the last century raised difficult and painful issues for African Americans struggling to gain justice and equal rights in American society. Kelly Miller, an African American academician and active polemicist for Negro rights, wrote in 1900, at the beginning of the Philippine American War, his essay “The Impact of Imperialism on the Negro Race” to exhort his fellow black Americans to oppose the US colonization of the Philippines and to support Philippine independence. Miller saw through the American government’s policy of “benevolent assimilation” toward the Philippines and recognized its racist underpinnings. For Miller the imperialist wars revealed the moral bankruptcy of the American government in violating the principles of the Declaration of Independence and reneging on its promise of equal rights to black Americans. In this essay I will argue that Miller espoused anti-imperialism as an assertion of a morally ascendant black subjectivity. In the face of rabid violent exclusion of blacks in American national life, Miller proposed an alternative narrative of history that contested the white narrative of racial supremacy. African Americans, in remaining loyal to the principles of equality and justice, would suffer so much more but would eventually and inevitably constitute a superior civilization based on moral principles. I will show, however, that like most other black middle class antiracist thinking of his time, Miller’s alternative narrative of black ascendancy was undermined by his acceptance of Western ideological paradigms of civilization and standards of moral superiority. Yet, Miller’s position raises important questions about the discursive “containment” of uplift ideology in the context of the imperialist debates.

To stand and fight: the struggle for civil rights in postwar New York City

Prologue: The Rise of the Struggle for Negro Rights 1 Jobs for All 2 Black Mobilization and Civil Rights Politics 3 Lynching, Northern style 4 Desegregating the metropolis 5 Dead Letter Legislation 6 An Unnatural Division of People 7 Anticommunism and Civil Rights 8 The Paradoxical Effects of the Cold War 9 Racial Violence in the Free World 10 Lift Every Voice and Vote 11 Resisting Resegregation 12 To Stand and Fight Epilogue: Another Kind of America Notes Acknowledgments Illustration Credits Index

Who Owns the Whip?: Chesnutt, Tourgee, and Reconstruction Justice

Justice is pictured blind and her daughter, law, ought at least to be color-blind. (Albion Tourgee, qtd. in Olsen, Thin 90) Nowhere, in history of our jurisprudence, has [the] power of courts been more strongly exerted than in matter of Negro rights, and nowhere has it been more swayed by prejudice and class interest. (Charles Chesnutt, Courts 1) In many ways, Albion Tourgee's relationship to turn-of-the-century African American writers is paradoxical. His fiction focusing on injustices suffered by African Americans in South, his continuous support of Reconstruction legislation, and his pro bono work on Plessy v. Ferguson case all demonstrated a profound commitment to changing racist structures of American society. He was perhaps most vocal and visible white writer who promoted radical Reconstruction. Later, in 1880s and early 1890s, a time when virtually no white people were harshly criticizing racial injustices, wrote a weekly column for Chicago Inter Ocean (A Bystander's Notes) advocating racial equality (Kull 119). His ideas and writing proved to be instrumental, and at times inspirational, to work of many emerging black writers. W. E. B. Du Bois claimed he was influenced by Tourgee's fiction, and in his 1910 article reflecting on Reconstruction, Du Bois cited favorably Tourgee's journalistic scholarship of twenty years earlier (Olsen, Tourgee 23). Even as he ardently supported negro cause, however, expressed attitudes which often appear naive, lacking insight into complex situation of Southern race relations. As his quote in epigraph illustrates, Tourgee's view of Reconstruction politics seems to be idealistic, depending upon a justice system in which right reason will prevail over racist sentiment. Clearly, understood that justice system was not free of racism; he argues, for example, in Plessy v. Ferguson that the Court has always been foe of liberty... until forced to move on by public opinion (qtd. in Lofgren 149). Yet even as he recognized these biases and fact that Supreme Court was governed by social tides, clung devoutly to notion that education of both Southern whites and blacks could lead to a color-blind justice system capable of transcending society's differences and correcting its injustices. Furthermore, his line of reasoning in Plessy case (which argues, among other things, that indeterminability of Homer Plessy's race should nullify segregation legislation) seems to protect mulatto elite, who could theoretically pass, rather than arguing for equality of African Americans as a whole. (1) Charles Chesnutt undoubtedly understood ambiguous position that held in relation to African American community. In his now well-known 1880 journal entry, Chesnutt cited Tourgee's fiction--principally A Fool's Errand--as inspiration for his stories of color line. Many critics have made much of this entry, in which he discusses immense popularity of Tourgee's writing and subject matter. Scholars such as Myles Raymond Hurd (Step), Julian Mason, Jr., Richard Lewis, Peter Caccavari, and Richard Brodhead (ch. 6) have all given extended attention to entry, quoting and analyzing it at length. These critics have rightly emphasized Tourgee's influence on Chesnutt's career as a writer, as one of sparks which ignited his literary aspirations. Nevertheless, when we look at both Tourgee's political career and his literary one in conjunction with Chesnutt's short stories, we can see that Chesnutt challenges very tenets upon which Tourgee's political and literary convictions rest. In this essay, I will argue that in final story of Wife of His Youth (1899), The Web of Circumstance, Chesnutt questions plausibility of seemingly progressive belief in a blind--or, in this case, color-blind--legal system in which so fiercely believed. …

The Cry was Unity: Communists and African Americans, 1917-36.

The Communist Party was the only political movement on the left in the late 1920s and 1930s to place racial justice and equality at the top of its agenda and to seek, and ultimately win, sympathy among African Americans. This historic effort to fuse red and black offers a rich vein of experience and constitutes the theme of The Cry Was Unity. Utilizing for the first time materials related to African Americans from the Moscow archives of the Communist Inter-national (Comintern), The Cry Was Unity traces the trajectory of the black-red relationship from the end of World War I to the tumultuous 1930s. From the just-recovered transcript of the pivotal debate on African Americans at the 6th Comintern Congress in 1928, the book assesses the impact of the Congress's declaration that blacks in the rural South constituted a nation within a nation, entitled to the right of self-determination. Despite the theory's serious flaws, it fused the black struggle for freedom and revolutionary content and demanded that white labor recognize blacks as indispensable allies. As the Great Depression unfolded, the Communists launched intensive campaigns against lynching, evictions, and discrimination in jobs and relief and opened within their own ranks a searing assault on racism. While the Party was never able to win a majority of white workers to the struggle for Negro rights, or to achieve the unqualified support of the black majority, it helped to lay the foundations for the freedom struggle of the 1950s and 1960s. The Cry Was Unity underscores the successes and failures of the Communist-led left and the ways in which it fought against racism and inequality. This struggle comprises an important missing page that needs to be returned to the nation's history. Mark Solomon, an emeritus professor at Simmons College, is the author of Red and Black: Communism and Afro-Americans, 1929-1935, Death Waltz to Armageddon: E. P. Thompson and the Peace Movement, and Stopping World War II (with Michael Myerson).

Cullen Montgomery Baker: Reconstruction Desperado (review)

248CIVIL WAR HISTORY African American freedom in the aftermath of the Civil War, Republicans also saw the Fifteenth Amendment as a mechanism for combating the influence of the Democratic party in national politics and eliminating political corruption. Between 1870 and 1873, Congress passed legislation giving the federal government the power to enforce theAmendment and to suppress antisuffrage violence. Protection of black suffrage continued into the 1 880s and provided the Republican party with a power base solid enough to guarantee its success in state and national elections and its control of the executive and legislative branches of the federal government. As national support for protecting the rights ofAfrican Americans waned in the 1 870s and 1 880s, factions within the Republican party found it increasingly difficult to agree on policies that could unify the party on this issue and to negotiate from a position of strength with their rivals. Wang argues that the party's policies were always the result of internal compromises that, although creating a working basis for the operation of the party, failed to eliminate factionalism within the party. It was the breakdown of consensus politics that led the party to abandon suffrage as the central focus of its political agenda; and the decline in the party's commitment accounted, in part, for the eventual disfranchisement of southern blacks. The Trial ofDemocracy is extensively researched and well written. Wang utilizes published and unpublished government documents as well as diaries, letters, and personal papers to synthesize the debate between Republican liberals , conservatives, and moderates and their opponents over the suffrage and enforcement issues. However, because Wang centers his work in the national political arena, women, African Americans, and immigrants remain on the periphery of the action. There is little sense of the human drama at work in the Reconstruction South as recently enfranchised freedmen and their disfranchised former owners struggled to determine their political roles in the New South. The value of Wang's work, however, lies in its depiction of a political party struggling to hold together diverse factions and to develop a coherent consensus on a critical issue of national politics in the late nineteenth century. He takes the suffrage debates beyond the dynamic of racial politics to the issues of constitutional interpretation of states' rights and the proper role offederal authority in the election process. This book is a valuable addition to resources on American political history in the late nineteenth century. Beverly Greene Bond University of Memphis Cullen Montgomery Baker: Reconstruction Desperado. By Barry A. Crouch and Donaly E. Brice. (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1997. Pp. xvi, 190. $34.95.) In an introduction the authors explain that most popular writers have described Cullen Baker from a Dunning school view as an ex-Confederate Robin Hood BOOK REVIEWS249 figure who opposed Reconstruction changes in Northeast Texas and Southwest Arkansas. Popular writers of western history or novels have portrayed Baker as the first fast-draw frontier gunfighter. Generally such writings relied primarily on oral recollections and folklore. In recent years historians have researched the documents of the period to offer more critical assessments of Baker as a bandit or guerrilla. This volume represents a detailed effort to compare folklore and fact in a search for the elusive reality of Baker's life. Baker came fromTennessee toTexas with his family, which owned no slaves. Feuds and vigilante violence existed in EastTexas, although the impact on Baker remains vague. Folklore suggests an inclination toward fighting and drinking in his youth, which led to mental instability from a blow to the head. Despite marriage in 1854, he committed assaults and murders, fleeing to relatives in Central Arkansas and later back to Texas. During the Civil War he joined and apparently deserted the Confederate army and remarried. Folklore suggests he worked briefly for the Union army, acted as a guerrilla, and began to hate and kill African Americans late in the war. After the war and the death of Baker's second wife, her sister rejected him in favor of schoolteacher Thomas Orr. Baker attacked Orr and began to engage in theft and murder of other Anglos. In 1 867 he gathered an outlaw band that fluctuated in...

Plenty of Room for Us All?: Participation and Prejudice in Charles Chesnutt's Dialect Tales

It is often difficult to convince students who are reading Charles Chesnutt's dialect tales for first time that his brief writing career, from about 1887 to 1905, coincided with nadir of American race relations.(1) Chesnutt insisted in 1903 that the rights of Negroes are at a lower ebb than at any time during thirty-five years of their freedom, and race prejudice intense and uncompromising, a comment borne out by period's record number of lynchings and systematic denial of civil and political rights to blacks.(2) Yet Uncle Julius appears to be doing pretty well, students are likely to point out, and his narrative forays into antebellum past function very effectively to secure former slave's post-war dotage. Although Chesnutt elsewhere plays role of social critic with brutal directness, conjure tales betray little anxiety over rapid deterioration of African-American rights after Reconstruction, and they include virtually no evidence of a more intense and uncompromising racial prejudice in Julius's fictional Patesville, North Carolina. It is tempting to respond to this characterization of dialect tales by alluding to Chesnutt's well-documented frustration with conventions of local color Southern fiction, conventions he successfully abandoned in strident and polemically charged non-dialect stories and novels, including Sheriff's Children, Web of Circumstance, and The Marrow of Tradition. Yet such an apologetic characterization of politically coy dialect tales overlooks their complicated engagement with contemporary issues, specifically issues related to abridgment of Fifteenth Amendment and restriction of African-American participation in post-Reconstruction Southern cultural life generally. The form of this engagement is so elusive because social critique in dialect tales operates in three quite different historical registers at once. Julius is significantly insulated from demise of race relations at end of nineteenth century, because he occupies what is for Chesnutt a crucial moment of historical transition, immediately after Reconstruction and just before retrenchment of white racist sentiment in South. Chesnutt dwells on this uncertain moment not as a nostalgic retreat from social realities of present, but because in Julius's world nature and extent of black participation in Southern cultural and political life remain open questions--questions Chesnutt was very much interested in reopening with readers in degenerating racial climate of 1880s and 1890s. Julius's tales of antebellum suffering under slavery thus resonate with significance for his own era, in which stories function like a form of post-war currency, and they also look forward to an America Julius can hardly imagine. A similar pattern of social critique occurs in Paul Laurence Dunbar's An Ante-Bellum Sermon, in which a slave preacher elaborates on story of Moses as a thinly veiled incitement to rebellion among members of his congregation. The analogy between Egyptian and American slavery made in poem's final and most interesting stanza suddenly points to a third term, citizenship: An' we'll shout ouah halleluyahs, On dat mighty reck'nin' day, When we' se reco' nized ez citiz'-- Huh uh! Chillun, let us pray!(3) Dunbar's incomplete reference to black citizens, word so aptly foreshortened to suggest precariousness of African-American citizenship in his own time, thrusts biblical legend and its antebellum subtext into charged racial discourse of 1890s, where not freedom but franchise is at stake. Chesnutt is rarely so obvious about direction of his satire, but dialect tales launch a similar brand of social critique that splinters in several directions at once. Julius's tales of antebellum slavery comment obliquely, but persistently, on both scene of their performance and scene of their composition. …

Separate but not Equal: The Supreme Court's First Decision on Racial Discrimination in Schools

In 1899, three years after the “separate but equal” decision of Plessy v. Ferguson, the U. S. Supreme Court for the first time confronted the problem of racial discrimination in education. Writing for a unanimous court, Justice John Marshall Harlan, whose recently refurbished reputation rests chiefly on his liberal opinions in Negro rights cases, decided in effect that the judiciary would do no more to guarantee equality in public services than it had to stop legalized segregation. ... the education of the people in schools maintained by state taxation is a matter belonging to the respective States, the justice, who was rarely a protector of states' rights, concluded, any interference on the part of Federal authority with the management of such schools cannot be justified except in the case of a clear and unmistakable disregard of rights secured by the supreme law of the land. We have here no such case to be determined …. Attracting even less attention at the time than Plessy did, the case of Joseph W. Cumming, James S. Harper, and John C. Ladeveze v. School Board of Richmond County, Ga. has never received the attention Plessy gained in the wake of the outlawing of segregation in the 1954 Brown decision.

Plessy v. Ferguson: A Reinterpretation

There have been three momentous Supreme Court decisions in the history of Afro-Americans: Dred Scott v. Sanford, Plessy v. Ferguson and Brown v. The Board of Education. In contrast to Dred Scott, Plessy was decided after the adoption of the Fourteenth Amendment which prohibited discriminatory state action in regard to equal protection of the laws and due process of law and after the coming of Social Darwinism which included a body of sociological theories utilized to supplement American conservatism. Considering the historical background of the times, Robert Harris regarded Plessy as "a compound of bad logic, bad history, bad sociology, and bad constitutional law." I Despite the historical significance of Plessy, its historiography is sparing, cursory, tangential and misleading. Among the outstanding monograph essays on the topic are: C. Vann Woodward's cursory historical account of the case in his article "The Birth of Jim Crow: Plessy v. Ferguson;" the brief and over-simplified account of the "separate but equal" origin in Leonard Levy and Harlan Phillips' article "The Roberts Case;" and two articles by Barton Bernstein in the Journal of Negro History interpreting the Plessy decision as sociological jurisprudence, and his 1962 case study analysis criticizing the Louisiana Supreme Court for misleading the United States Supreme Court in regard to state statutes and legal issues.2 Significant related essays on Plessy may be found in Otto H. Olsen's documentary compilation The Thin Disguise, and a similar documentary edition by Albert P. Blaustein and Clarence Clyde Ferguson, Jr. entitled Desegregation and the Law. There are several essays, articles and books explaining the historical problems and different interpretations of Jim Crow history. Of major importance are: John Hope Franklin, "History of Racial Segregation in the United States;" August Meier and Elliott Rudwick, "A Strange Chapter in the Career of Jim Crow"-a study on Black opposition to street car segregation in Savannah, Georgia; Joel Williamson (ed.), The Origins of Segregation, which is a collection of controversial essays on the topic; a series of articles by Alexander M. Bickel, John P. Frank and Robert F. Munro and Alfred Kelly indicating that the Fourteenth Amendment did not require the Supreme Court to embrace the "separate but equal" principle, and Alan Westin's valuable analysis of Justice John Marshall Harlan in his "John Marshall Harlan and the Constitutional Rights of Negroes: The Transformation of a Southerner."3 The most popular reference in regard to recent segregation is C. Vann Woodward's Strange Career of Jim Crow; but the most thorough study of underlying economic factors, politics, philosophy and

Racism and Republican Emergence in Illinois, 1848-1860: A Re-Evaluation of Republican Negrophobia

RACISM AND REPUBLICAN EMERGENCE IN ILLINOIS, 1848-1860: A RE-EVALUATION OF REPUBLICAN NEGROPHOBIA John M. Rozett In 1848 the citizens of Illinois were confronted by two major issues which probed their attitudes toward slavery and the plight of the black man. The emergence of the Free Soil party in the 1848 Presidential election provided the voters with an opportunity to oppose the extension of slavery into the territories; the state constitutional referendum of 1848 presented the voters with a separate clause on Negro exclusion which, when passed, permitted the state to prohibit the immigration of free Negroes into Illinois. It seems simple and logical to equate free soil and anti-exclusionist sentiment and to assume that the Illinois Free Soilers also opposed Negro exclusion. By extension, the free soil Republican party which emerged six years later can also be assumed to have incorporated free soilism and antiexclusionism under one moralistic anti-slavery banner. However, these traditional assumptions are now the subject of considerable debate , for free soil sentiment sprang from a variety of sources including a virulent Negrophobia which some historians believe supplied the dynamic element of the free soil crusade. "Racial prejudice—as well as economic, political, and idealistic factors—," wrote James A. Rawley, "was a foundation for thinking about slavery in the territories." Rawley argued that "when antislavery sentiment sought political action through the Free Soil Party, it evaded the issue of Negro rights." Instead, the chosen issue of the party was the threatened presence of the Negro, for "Keeping the territories free for white men only was the only anti-slavery stand northern voters might be expected to support."1 Eugene H. Berwanger also maintained that "prejudice against Negroes was a factor in the development of anti-slavery feeling in the antebellum United States." Berwanger argued that "Anti-Negro prejudice became more pronounced as the extension of slavery became a more dominant issue," and as whites began to fear that the newly opened territories would become inundated with blacks. "Early opposition to slavery extension centered in the Free Soil 1 James A. Rawley, Race and Politics: "Bleeding Kansas" and the Coming of the Civil War (New York, 1969), pp. vin, 12. 101 102CIVIL WAR HISTORY Party," he explained, "but some of its members adhering to its principles did so more out of repugnance to the presence of the Negro than to moral revulsion against slavery."2 The western states, Berwanger pointed out, had enacted from the beginning "stringent restrictions" against free Negroes, and this discrimination reached its height in the period from 1846 to I860. An Illinois law of 1829, for example, required a $1000 bond from immigrant free blacks, but then, in March of 1848, Illinois voters decided 50,261 to 21,297 to exclude free blacks entirely—70.2 per cent for Negro exclusion.3 Opponents of the anti-slavery political parties—first the Free Soil and then the Republican—attempted to equate racial equality with anti-slavery sentiment. Sensing the importance of these accusations, Berwanger explained, "politically astute" Republicans moved to still white fears and became "frantic to disclaim" such charges.4 Consequently the argument evolved of free territories for white men only as the free soil proponents sought to assure Negrophobes about their intentions by insisting that they represented the true interests of the white man and white labor. These arguments had their desired effect, Berwanger contended, and won the votes of Negrophobes. For some Republicans, he admitted, such arguments were mere propaganda, and by 1860 the Republican party "was too diverse in its make-up to attempt a suggestion of the precise amount of support it received from Negrophobes."5 The thrust of Berwanger's argument, however, an argument buttressed by exclusion or suffrage limitation in states throughout the Northwest, is that a very sizable element of both the Free Soil and Republican parties was composed of racist Negrophobes concerned only with keeping a proper distance between themselves and blacks—free or slave. The contention that many of the free soilers were racist is an important historical point, one which has grown out of the heightened racial awareness of the last two decades and which has served as a necessary corrective...

A Study of the Development Process of the Student Movement at Berkeley

The author intends to clarify what the student movement at Berkeley was. A visual and physical upheaval happened on September 10, 1964 on the campus of the University of California, Berkeley and lasted until the end of the year. We know that the main uproar was caused by the Regent's policy announced by Katherine Towle of Dean of Students on September 14, 1964 which prohibited the use of University facilities for the purpose of soliciting party membership or supporting or opposing particular candidates or propositions in local, state or national elections. This brought reactions from students of student organizations. Student Organizations which are affected by the new university policy petitioned the Dean of Students for the use of the area. When they realized that the decision could not be changed, they started to protest against the Dean, the Chancellor, the President, the Faculty Cemmittee, the Academic Senate, the Board of Regents, etc., with various kinds of means : picketing, conducting vigils and rallies, touching off civil disobedience, and the like. It is known that the movement is called the Free Speech Movement and was organized formally on October 3, 1964. According to numerous researches, however, the purpose and the character of the movement were not initiated by the organization or by the distribution of the Slate Supplement Report, but were influenced by the off-campus movements and organizations. There was the civil-rights movement outside the campus which was introduced from the Southern states. A fairly large number of students worked as volunteers in Southern states to help Negroes organize and participate in the civil-rights movement during the past summer. A further influence upon the movement came from the famous student riot at the San Francisco City Hall in 1960, against the House Committee on Un-American Activities hearing. Off-campus organizations such as SNCC (Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee), CORE (Congress of Racial Equality), SDS (Students for Democratic Society) and W.E.B. Du Bois Clubs of America influenced on the movement in respect to their philosophy, goal, means, tactics and strategies. Poverty and human rights of Negroes and Vietnam war introduced stagnant atmosphere among college students who used to be inclined to the philosophy and way of life of Hippies. Moreover, the idea of multiversity by President Clark Kerr became one of the targets of the movement. Students are not interested in the idea of “knowledge industry” of the University of California, Berkeley. The movement is obliged to end. The direction toward the end of uproar came from several groups and organizations both on-campus and off-campus. They are the Associated Student Union of California, University Students for Law and Order, a group of professors who urged students to attend classes and start their studies, the Board of Regents, Labor Unions and Public Journals.

Populist Dreams and Negro Rights: East Texas as a Case Study

NEARLY A CENTURY LATER the Populist decade lingers in historical memory as an increasingly dim abstraction. The very word no longer carries specific political meaning. It is now invoked to explain George Wallace, as it was used to explain Lyndon Johnson in the sixties, Joe McCarthy in the fifties, and Claude Pepper in the forties. Though afflicting principally the popular mind, this confusion is at least partly traceable to those historians who have insisted on concentrating on Populism as exhortation, so that Ignatius Donnelly's utopian novels or Mary Lease's pronouncements on the respective uses of corn and hell become the explanatory keys to agrarian radicalism. For scholars who mine political movements with a view to extracting cultural nuggets, the focus has been chiefly upon the word, not the deed; in the process the; agrarian crusade has become increasingly obscure.'l Much of the difficulty centers on the subject of race. There is essential agreement that, on economic issues, Populists were men of the Left, primitive to some, prophetic to others, but leftists to all. But did their banner indicate a highly selective nativist radicalism for whites only, or did they grapple with the inherited legacies of the caste system as part of an effort to

Populist Dreams and Negro Rights: East Texas as a Case Study

Populist Dreams and Negro Rights: East Texas as a Case Study

Comparative Extension of Personal and Social-Political Future Time Perspective

Measures of personal future time perspective (FTP) and social-political FTP and an endorsement of Negro rights militancy scale were administered to 119 white and 221 black high school students, of whom 103 and 188 respectively produced usable data. The two racial subgroups did not differ in capacity to take a long-range point of view in regard to their personal futures; however, the black students organized their attitudes about black liberation in terms of a much briefer future time span than that considered appropriate by whites. Militancy was not associated with any deficiency in the ability to anticipate the future.

The rhetoric of a righteous reform: George Washington Julian's 1852 campaign against slavery

Indiana's foremost white spokesman for the slave, George Washington Julian, carried his antislavery campaign through much of the Midwest in 1852, a particularly difficult year for advocates of Negro rights. An analysis of Julian's canvass suggests that his speechmaking advanced antislavery in several important ways, and that his successes rested upon rhetorical strategies and a motivation to speak which grew in part from his inter‐related views of rhetoric, God, and reform.

Political Reform and Negro Rights in the Senate, 1909-1915

Political Reform and Negro Rights in the Senate, 1909-1915

Negro Rights Activities in Gold Rush California

Research Article| March 01 1966 Negro Rights Activities in Gold Rush California Rudolph M. Lapp Rudolph M. Lapp Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar California Historical Society Quarterly (1966) 45 (1): 3–20. https://doi.org/10.2307/25154100 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Share Icon Share Twitter LinkedIn Tools Icon Tools Get Permissions Cite Icon Cite Search Site Citation Rudolph M. Lapp; Negro Rights Activities in Gold Rush California. California Historical Society Quarterly 1 March 1966; 45 (1): 3–20. doi: https://doi.org/10.2307/25154100 Download citation file: Ris (Zotero) Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search nav search search input Search input auto suggest search filter All ContentCalifornia History Search This content is only available via PDF. Copyright 1966 California Historical Society Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.