In 1800, there had been about 1 million African Americans in the U.S. By 1860 this number had tripled, to 4.4 million. By 1900 that number had doubled, to 8.8 million. In 1900 there were 75.9 million people in the U.S. overall. African Americans were 11.6% of the U.S. population. In 1900, all but 900,000 of the African Americans still lived in the South. In 1900, there were 193,000 black-owned farms in the U.S. By 1910 the number rose to 218,467. However, for the masses of African Americans, in 1900, 3/4ths of African Americans in the South were sharecroppers. They were still like serfs, just a step above slavery. Sharecropping was an informal, economic slavery rather than a formal, legal system of slavery that defined the slave as chattel or property. To repeat, on paper the slaves were free. In reality they were slaves by a new name, which was sharecroppers. The difference was they weren't being whipped any more and their families weren't being broken up anymore and African American women didn't have to work in the fields like beasts of burden any more. On paper, African Americans were citizens with equal civil and political rights. In practice they had inferior social rights. They were segregated, separate and unequal. On paper, African Americans had the 15th Amendment and could vote. In practice, they were disenfranchised by the literacy test and poll tax.

Of course black women were still the domestics and maids who cleaned the wealthy white woman's house; and cared for the wealthy white woman's children; and did the wealthy white woman's laundry and ironing; and cooked the wealthy white woman's meals. This was not simply a racial relationship: it was a class or economic relationship. The poor yeomen white women had to do all of that themselves. Poor white women didn't have any maids. The stereotype of the white man was that he was Mr. Charlie. The stereotype of the wealthy white woman was Ms. Anne.

As for illiteracy, in 1880 70% of AFAMs were illiterate

in 1890 57% of AFAMs were illiterate

in 1900 44.5% of AFAMs were illiterate

STEREOTYPING

I have insisted that the Nadir was a reign of terror in which African Americans were lynched, burned, mutilated, etc. African Americans were humiliated by the rituals of segregation and labeled as inferior. Furthermore, African American men were demonized and vilified by the media and writers of the time. Everywhere there was the image of the black man as barbarian, beast, savage, animal, rapist. Basically, African Americans were subjected to character assassination in print. In 1902 Thomas Dixon published a book called The Clansman. It depicted the horrors of Negro rule in Reconstruction and the KKK as saviors of the South. This book became the basis for the silent film, Birth of a Nation, produced by D.W. Griffith, in 1915. In 1900 Charles Carroll published The Negro [as] a Beast. The title is self explanatory. It meant that the African American was really an animal, not a real or true human being. In 1907 Robert Shufeldt published a book entitled The Negro, A Menace to American Civilization. (Woodward, Origins, p. 352). In a sentence, the untamed Negro was a menace to society. This was a period of overt white supremacy. It was naked, brutal, violent and out in the open. Senator Ben Tillman of South Carolina openly declared that the Negro was really a monkey, and as an inferior, subhuman species Negroes deserved to be segregated and disenfranchised and lynched. In this time period, too, the stereotype was widely spread that African Americans all had syphilis. In this time period Darwin's theory of evolution was becoming more widely known, and blacks were depicted as an evolutionary missing link between humans and the apes. The black man had come from Africa. Gorillas and chimpanzees lived in Africa. Therefore, blacks must be more closely related to the animals and the apes than whites.

Commentary: The media was used to disseminate these stereotypes, and brainwash white people into truly believing the ideology of white supremacy. I repeat again, if we think of racism or white supremacy as a wall, then stereotypes are the bricks in that wall. If we are going to dismantle the wall of racism, we have to deconstruct the stereotypes. We have to dismantle the wall one brick and one stereotype at a time. Combating racism begins with confronting and exposing stereotypes. We are prisoners of stereotypes. As a nation, both black and white, we are imprisoned within the stereotypes that we have inherited from the past. And these stereotypes sometimes are subliminal and subconscious but they are there nonetheless. But we cannot even begin to remove them until first we name them and identify them and expose them. That is the first step. Until we admit that the stereotypes are there, we are lost in denial. The very first step in racism education, as in treating alcoholism or drug addiction or any substance abuse, is to confront denial. We cannot progress as a nation, or heal as a nation, until we come out of denial. But back in the nadir African Americans were stereotyped as inferior and subhuman, as monkeys or chimpanzees, and black people were being blamed for the economic problems and the hardship of the impoverished South. Black people were being scapegoated. And black people were the victims of displaced aggression.

THE LAW AS AN INSTRUMENT OF OPPRESSION

In addition to all of this terrorism and intimidation, the law continued to be used as an instrument of domination and oppression. In South Carolina, in 1897, a new contract law was adopted. It said that if any laborer, working for a share of the crop of for wages, receives advances and then without just cause fails to perform the "reasonable services" [which might be anything] required of him, he may receive a fine or imprisonment. In 1903 Mississippi passed a law which made it a felony for any person to steal a chicken. The punishment would be a fine of $200 or 5 years in prison. Mississippi also had a law making it a crime to steal a pig, also subject to a fine and a prison term of up to 5 years in prison. In fact, this pig law in one form or another dated back to the days of white indentured servitude in Virginia in the colonial period, in the 1670s.

African American sharecroppers were thoroughly powerless and vulnerable and intimidated. The African American sharecropper knew that at any moment he could be accused of something as simple as stealing a chicken or a pig, hauled into court, sentenced, and sent to prison. This was the time period of the infamous chain gangs, and convict lease. Convicts were used by lumber companies, mining companies, railroad construction companies and sawmills to perform heavy labor, and proprietors leased them to grow cotton. The death rate on the chain gangs, overall, approached 25%. It was higher at some facilities than at others. Sadly, many people died before they completed the term of their sentence. The most notorious of these prisons was the so-called Parchman state penitentiary, or Parchman Farm, in Mississippi. The only humane feature of this system was the occasional conjugal visit. But it was not uncommon for an unruly or "impudent" African American to end up framed, imprisoned and on the chain gang, never to return (go to article). Being sent to the chain gang under this system was like a death sentence. And this threat hung over the heads of poor African Americans, especially those who were politically and economically the most powerless and the most vulnerable. These of course, were the sharecroppers. And the chain gang was but another weapon in the arsenal of terrorism in the nightmare years of the nadir.

BLACK LABOR: WHITE PROFIT

I cannot emphasize enough that during slavery white profit depended upon the super-exploitation of black labor. That it what a slave was: A slave was an object, a thing, that white capitalists used to enrich themselves. The slave was free or unpaid labor. The purpose of slavery was profit. In the antebellum South, white profit depended upon the exploitation of black labor. In sharecropping, white profit depended upon the exploitation of black labor. The economic logic of white supremacy in the South was to bring black people here as captives, and keep them here, to dominate them and use them. The essence of white supremacy in the South was use. White supremacy in the South was the exploitation of the labor of black people in order to enrich white people. This is a dual system of both racism and capitalism. It is capitalist racism, or racism/capitalism. If white people had simply hated black people, they would have left them in Africa. Instead, they brought black people 3,000 miles across the Atlantic Ocean from Africa and kept them here in order to use them (us) as a race of robot workers.

SUPER-EXPLOITATION

Slavery is the maximization of profit, because you don't have to pay the slave any wage at all. The white indentured servants and the white working class were badly exploited. The black slaves were super-exploited. The white indentured servant of the colonial period was a servant for 4-7 years. The slave was a slave for life, and it was hereditary. It is a difference of degree and severity. The total exploitation of the slave is super-exploitation. And the historic practice that black labor is paid less than white labor is more super-exploitation. In the context of African American history and the U.S., super-exploitation is the fact that historically, black labor has almost always been compensated at a lower rate or wage than white labor. (board). Today we say that labor in the Third World is super-exploited relative to labor in the US and the industrialized countries, because workers in Korea and Taiwan and Thailand and Malaysia and elsewhere may get $1 and hour or 50 cents or a bowl of rice where an American gets minimum wage ($5). Today super-exploitation is globalized or internationalized.

And as the economy moved from agriculture to industry, in the industrial sector black labor was paid less than white labor. Black labor has always been super-exploited. Which is to say (again) that black workers are usually paid less than white workers. Historically, black people were relegated to the dirty jobs, the menial jobs, the heavy jobs. They were the janitors and sanitation workers. They cleaned up other people's trash and cleaned other people's toilets. They got the jobs that white men didn't want. Black people got the scraps that fell from the economic table. And even if a black man and a white man performed the same job, such as carpenter, welder, electrician, shipworker--whether in the North or the South,-- black men were paid less. This remained true until 1964.

Especially in the South, the labor market was stratified. There was a hierarchy of access. White men (native born) get jobs first. Whatever is "left over" can then go to European immigrants. Whatever is "left over" after this can go to Afro-Americans. In the racial etiquette of the South, it was a horrible transgression (a crime, the breaking of an unwritten rule) for a black man to receive a job if there were white men who wanted a job and did not have one. A transgression such as this could lead to violence and death. The unwritten rule in the South was that no black man should be allowd to have a job until all of the white men who wanted a job had one. Then blacks would have what was left over.

Not until 1964 was there a federal law forbidding discrimination--nationwide-- on the basis of race and sex in employment. Until 1964, under federal law, racial and sexual discrimination in hiring and wages and employment was legal. The only exception, as of 1941, was in defense contracting, where the federal government awarded federal money in the form of contracts for military production. In 1941, Franklin D. Roosevelt issued an executive forbidding racial discrimination in defense contracting. And he did this because A. Philip Randolph was organizing a mass march on Washington to protest against racial discrimination in defense industries. Some Northern states (such as New Jersey) began to adopt state laws against discrimination on the basis of race or national origin in employment. But with these exceptions, until 1964 it was legal for most companies to have a policy "we don't hire blacks." It was perfectly legal to pay blacks and Mexicans and Latinos and Asians and women less than whites and less than men. It was perfectly legal for unions to refuse to admit blacks as members and have white only unions, or to segregate blacks into separate locals, or exclude blacks from apprenticeship programs. Then, because you had not gotten an apprenticeship, you were not qualified to get the job. If you had to be a member of the union to get the job and the union excluded blacks, then you were just out in the cold. This is why the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which is what Martin Luther King fought for, was so important. The March on Washington in August 1963 became an effort to lobby for passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 that banned segregation in public accommodations and discrimination in hiring and employment.

Commentary: Until 1964, African American people in this country didn't have any economic opportunity. This is an extreme statement, but it is almost as if slavery didn't end until 1964, and we are really just one generation removed from slavery. So when people ask, "why do the African Americans lag so far behind the other groups, and how come the European immigrants managed to pull themselves up out of poverty but the black people haven't; and what is wrong with them," the question is ignorant. These questions come from an uninformed mind. But unfortunately, there are still a lot of ignorant and uninformed minds in this country.

JOB DISCRIMINATION IN THE NORTH

For the white working class, racial discrimination took the form of excluding African Americans from jobs. Racism was rational. For the white working class, racial discrimination was and is job protection. If there aren't enough jobs to go around, and the black man is viewed as an unwelcome rival and threat and competitor, then the rational thing to do is to exclude him and monopolize the jobs for yourself and your group.

In the South the pattern of race relations was to keep the black man there to exploit his labor. He was hated. He was labeled as inferior and regarded as an animal. He was held in contempt. But economically (until 1944) he was necessary. In fact, in agriculture he was indispensable--at least until Southerners could afford tractors in the 1930s and the mechanical cotton picker (1944). Then he became expendable.

But in the North, European immigrants were the main labor supply. Until 1916 the North didn't need black labor, and didn't want it. In the North the black man was perceived as an unwelcome threat to the jobs of the white working class, which historically was an immigrant working class. It was true then, and it is still true today. As Jeffrey Praeger describes, for the white working class, job discrimination in the form of exclusion of African Americans was rational--in the short term or the short run. It served their economic or class interests. Racism has both rational and irrational components, simultaneously. For the white working class, job discrimination or racism is job protection. Historically whites excluded blacks from jobs and in this way monopolized economic opportunity. But the consequence for African Americans, once they leave sharecropping and agriculture and come into the modern, urban, industrial economy after 1900, is chronic joblessness or unemployment. The black man in the agricultural South always had a place. It was at the bottom, as a farm laborer, but he had a place and a necessary place. But since World War, from 1945 to the present, the rate of unemployment for blacks or African Americans is always twice what it is for whites. Blacks are the last hired and the first fired. Historically, even in the North, the labor market was stratified, with a hiearchy or preferential or prioritized access. At the top of th epecking order were white, native-born Protestants (or people with British-American sounding names). Next were other northern Europeans (blonde hair, blue eyes, German, Dutch, Scandinavian, Irish PROTESTANTS). Next were Catholics (Irish, Italians). Next were Slavic peoples (Poles [who are Catholic], Slovaks, Croats [who are Catholic], Serbs, Russians, Ukrainians [the last three are most often Eastern Orthodox], Hungarians, Greeks, etc. Even further down are Jews. So the order of preference among whites is Protestant, Catholic, Jew. And then lowest down in the pecking order are blacks (Afro-Americans), Puerto Ricans, Filipinos, Mexicans and Asians (non-whites).

After the white men are hired, black men get whatever is left over. In general, it was viewed culturally as a transgression for a black man to get a job if there were white men who didn't have a job--unless it was a job that white man had rejected, and didn't want. Thus, blacks were "supposed" to receive the "extra" or "surplus" jobs. It woukld be transgressive for blacks to "take" (usurp) jobs from whites. Whites had a "superior" claim, a "prior" claim, a "higher ranking" claim, to jobs.

And if there aren't enough jobs to go around, then the black man just doesn't get one. He is shut out, he is locked out, he just doesn't get ANYTHING. In the urban, Northern economy his place is not even at the bottom. He doesn't have any place at all. His place is to be confined to a reservation called a ghetto, and we let him out to work for us when we have surplus jobs and when we need him--and we fire him and send him back to the ghetto when we don't need him any more. This is an elastic labor supply. Labor becomes a variable cost. The ghetto is in part a labor reservation. It is a reservation for black labor, that society taps when it needs it and discards when it doesn't. The African American becomes the spare tire. We employ him when we need him, and when we don't need him we put him away. Or society gives him some welfare so that he doesn't starve, and to pacify him so that he doesn't riot. The African American simply becomes "redundant." He is marginal (located at the outer edge, on the margins). He is marginalized. For African Americans in the North and in the cities the greatest threat and problem is unemployment. How can you do anything in this society or participate in society if you do not have an income, and how do you get an income if you don't have a job? You don't. So you sell drugs instead. And then we catch you and put you in jail.

The Southern pattern is domination. It is super-exploitation. It is the smothering blanket. The Northern pattern is exclusion: At worst it was the attitude "we don't want you; we don't need you; it was a mistake to bring your ancestors here in the first place--but we blame that on the South; we're sorry we brought your ancestors here, and we wish we could send you back. But we can't do that, so we're stuck with you. So we'll segregate you in ghettos because we don't want you moving into our neighborhoods, and if you do we'll move to the suburbs to get away from you. Liberals don't share this view, but there is still in the North a deep reservoir or residue of this racial antipathy. This antipathy against African Americans and the effort, whether overt or covert, to exclude blacks, is part of what we as a nation are still trying to overcome. But we cannot overcome 300 plus years of white supremacy from 1640 to 1964 overnight. And 37 years of Affirmative Action from 1965 to 2002 has not overcome 300 years of white supremacy either.

In addition, this is not to say that European immigrants had it "easy." There was terrible prejudice against the Catholic and Jewish immigrants, especially the Irish Catholics, Italians, Poles and Slavs. But the difference is this: The immigrant was HIRED. He was selected or chosen for a job in the factory or slaughterhouse or mine. The African American went down to the factory gate to ask for a job, too. He wasn't hired, selected or chosen. The immigrant was allowed the privilege of having a job. He got to work. So often, the African American was not allowed the privilege of work. His "lot" was unemployment.

I contend that we cannot even begin to understand racism in the North unless we grasp the fact that historically, economically, there has been an antagonism or an economic conflict of interest between blacks and the white working class. The white working class in the North has been profoundly racist, because it (or they) viewed blacks as competitors and a threat to their jobs. This, along with the doctrine of black inferiority, is the bedrock or foundation of working class racism. The stereotype of a Northern white liberal is a middle class professional, who rarely has to compete with blacks for a job. In a sense, the middle class professional can afford the luxury of being liberal because his job is secure and he does not have to worry about competing with blacks. However, as more blacks become college educated, and seek entry into professional schools and white collar jobs, that too may change. White racism exists in direct proportion to the degree to which whites feel threatened by blacks, whether in their neighborhoods or in their jobs.

And let me give the opinion that we cannot move forward as a nation until all of us are able to admit this and acknowledge this, without it being personal and without it being perceived as a hostile accusation. We cannot confront our fears and anxieties as long as we deny that they exist. And these fears may be sub-conscious. The perception of fear is real. The sense of threat is real. There is no shame in admitting it. The only shame is in denial. Because then we are lying to ourselves.

THE EXODUS

Given the atrocities taking place in the South, African Americans began to leave. On p. 278 of your textbook there is a discussion of Benjamin "Pap" Singleton. In 1879 he urged African Americans to leave the racist South and go west, to Kansas and Oklahoma. No one knows for certain how many people left, but estimates vary from 50,000 to 98,000. Unfortunately there was segregation in Kansas too.

ENCLAVES (repeats some material from lecture on Kansas Exodus)

Other African Americans sought to establish separate African American towns, or townships, sometimes called enclaves. In 1872, for example, African Americans established the town of Muskogee in Oklahoma. In 1887 the black town of Mound Bayou was established in Mississippi (Carlisle, 91). In 1889 Edwin McCabe established another black town in Oklahoma, called Langston (Carlisle, 97) In 1903 Boley was formed in Oklahoma (Carlisle, 99). These towns had their own businesses, sheriffs, officials, schools. Basically the people there felt that if black people could not live in peace and equality among white folk then they would form separate towns of their own and happily live apart--by choice. Even in New Jersey there were black townships.

LIFE EXPECTANCY

Let me share with you one other statistic. In 1900, the average life expectancy for a white man was 47 years. For a white woman it was 49 years. For blacks, it was 33 years. The average black man was dead by age 33, so that many children grew up in homes in which the mother was a widow or had to remarry to have a provider for her children, and you would have a woman who had been married twice and had children with two successive fathers. (Robert Divine, T.H. Breen, George Fredrickson, R. Hal Williams, America Past and Present, p. 640).

FROM THE FILE 1900.DOC

EFFORTS AT ETHNIC GROUP SELF ORGANIZATION

The African American middle-class also sought to rely on itself. In 1890 T. Thomas Fortune established the Afro American League (JHF, p. 288). In 1900 the National Negro Business League was established (JHF, p. 283). Madam C.J. Walker (JHF, p. 284) founded a flourishing business in hair products and skin preparations. She also developed a heating comb to straighten hair. Later, her daughter A'Lelia was a sponsor and patroness of the Harlem Renaissance. By 1914 there were 55 black owned banks (JHF, p. 285). In North Carolina in 1898 John Merrick and his partners organized the North Carolina Mutual Life Insurance Co, one of the most successful black-owned life insurance companies in the nation (JHF, p. 287). In Atlanta, A.F. Herndon gained control of the Atlanta Mutual Aid Association and reorganized it as the Atlanta Life Insurance Co.

LITERARY EXPRESSION AND JOURNALISM

Paul Laurence Dunbar began publishing poetry in 1893 and became one of the greatest African American poets. In 1898 he published a novel entitled The Uncalled. many whites could not believe that an African American could be so literate, eloquent, lyrical. By this time period there were 150 African American newspapers, including a militant newspaper called The Guardian, published in Boston by William Monroe Trotter (1901) [JHF, p. 293].

MUSIC

At the turn of the century there were also significant cultural developments in the African-American community. Music is an aspect of culture, or the creative production and expression of any group of people. Culture is not static. People constantly engage in a process of cultural innovation and creativity. People constantly reshape and reinvent their culture. It is a living process.

By the 1890s the African American brass bands in New Orleans innovated a new form of music. It was called jazz. The brass band was a standard feature of black life in New Orleans. Every volunteer fire station, every social event or dance, or dinner of the lodges or masons or elks, or athletic competition featured a brass band, typically with bugles, trombones, coronets and trumpets. Bands even played at the bars and brothels. One of the earliest practitioners or performers was Charles Buddy Bolden, a coronet player. he is credited with putting jazz on the map (see The Enduring Vision, p. 651a).

In 1911 Scott Joplin pioneered a new musical form called "ragtime," and published The Maple Leaf Rag.

The old chants and work songs of the plantation were pricked up as a form of secular or worldly or non-religious music, called The Blues. Sometimes the Blues could be downright raunchy. The pioneer of the Blues was W.C. Handy. In 1912 he published a composition called "Mr. Crump," for the political campaign of a politician named Edward "Boss" Crump, in Memphis, TN. Afterward it became better known as Memphis Blues. His composition St. Louis Blues, of 1914, is also well known. The blues can be quite sad, but given what was happening in the nadir we should not be surprised that African Americans would express the tragedy and hardship of their lives in their music. Even the slaves, as oppressed as they were, took comfort and solace in their music.

And in this time period the old Negro spirituals, from slavery, were combined with the blues and other forms of music to create something called black gospel music or gospel blues. However the themes were religious rather than worldly. The man credited with being the founder of black gospel music is Thomas A. Dorsey. His best known composition is probably "Precious Lord, Take My Hand." He could not get his songs published in the 1920s, and he literally went from church to church performing. Eventually, of course, it did catch on.