AfricanAmerican History Chapter 17 Flashcards
1
Q
The Birth of a Nation
A
- In 1915 D. W. Griffith released The Birth of a Nation, a cinematic masterpiece. and historical travesty based on Thomas Dixon’s 1905 novel The Clansman.
- Both the book and the film purported to depict and ignorant Negroes joined by shady mulattoes and greedy white and ignorant Negroes joined by shady mulattoes and greedy white Republicans ruthlessly seize control of state government. The heroic and honorable Ku Klux Klan saves the state and rescues its white womanhood.
- The NAACP was enraged by The Birth of a Nation and fought to halt its presentation. The motion picture unleashed racist violence. Thanks largely to NAACP opposition, the film was banned in Pasadena, California; Wilmington, Delaware, and Boston.Ironically, the NAACP campaign may have provided publicity that attracted more viewers to the film. By the same token, however, the campaign also helped increase NAACP membership.
2
Q
United Negro Improvement Association (UNIA)
A
- Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA) Black nationalist organization founded by Marcus Garvey in 1914.
- With several million loyal and enthusiastic followers, Marcus Garvey Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA) became the largest mass movement of black people in American history.
- With the formation of the New York division of the UNIA in Harlem in 1917, Garvey exhorted, “Up you mighty race!” as he commanded black people to take control of their destiny. Still, he blamed them for their predicament. “That the Negro race became a race of slaves was not I the fault of God Almighty … it was the fault of the race.” Their salvation would result from their own exertion and not from concessions by white people.
- He regularly couched his rhetoric in religious terms.
- He came to be known as the Black Moses, a messiah.
- Although Garvey and the UNIA are most frequently associated with urban communities in the North, the UNIA also spread rapidly through h the rural South in the 1920s. Black farmers and sharecroppers established UNIA chapters from Virginia to Louisiana.
3
Q
Marcus Garvey
A
- Garvey was born in 1887 in the British colony of Jamaica, the eleventh child in a rural family. He quit school at age fourteen and became a printer in Kingston, the island’s capital. He was promoted t foreman before he was fired in 1907 for pro-labor activities during a strike.
- He returned to Jamaica and founded the UNIA in 1914.
- Garvey may be best remembered for his proposal to return black people to Africa by way of the Black Star Line, a steamship company he founded in 1919. Garvey sold stock in the company for five dollars a share. He hoped to establish a fleet with black officers and crew members that became the first ship in the fleet.
4
Q
Pan-African-ism
A
- Garvey, Du Bois, and other black leaders believed people of African descent from around the world should come together. They would share their heritage, discuss their ties to the continent, and explore ways to moderate—if not eliminate—colonial rule in Africa.
- The first Pan-African Congress had convened in London in 1900. It was organized principally by Henry Sylvester Williams, a lawyer from Trinidad who had resided in Canada and then London.
- The second Pan-African Congress met in Paris for three days in February 1919, near Versailles, where the peace conference ending World War 1 was assembled. There were fifty-eight delegates from sixteen nations. Du Bois was among the sixteen African Americans in attendance. (None of them had been to Africa.) Marcus Garvey did not attend.
- Two more Pan-African Congresses in the 1920s met in Brussels and London but also failed to influence the policies of the colonial powers .
5
Q
Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters (BSCP)
A
- Pullman porters would form a labor union to challenge one of America’s most powerful corporations. The key figure in this effort was A. Philip Randolph. In 1925 a gathering of Pullman porters in Harlem invited Randolph to become their “general organizer” as they formed the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters (BSCP).
- By the 1920s the Pullman Company, which owned and operated passanger railroad coaches, was the single largest employer of black people in the United States.
- More than twelve thousand black men worked as porters on Pullman railroad cars.
- After founding the Pullman Palace Car Company in 1867, George Pullman decided to employ only black men as porters. Prosperous white people were accustomed to being waited on by black servants. Furthermore, black employees could be and were paid less than white workers.
- To add to the indignity, white travelers invariably referred to these black men as “George,” no matter what their actual name was.
- Although strenuous and time consuming, Pullman employ- ment was the most satisfactory work many black men cc could hope to achieve. Barr As poorly paid as they were compared with many white workers, they still earned more than most black schoolteachers.
6
Q
A Philip Randolph
A
- Randolph was a socialist with superb oratorical skills.
- He was born in 1889 in Crescent City, Florida. He attended high school at Cookman Institute (later Bethune-Cookman College). In 1911 he migrated to New York City where he attended City College and joined the Socialist Party.
- he founded The Messenger, a monthly socialist journal that drew the attention of federal agents.
- Randolph was an improbable militant. He was handsome, dignified, impeccably dressed, and aloof. Save for his color, he could have been mistaken for the sort of Wall Street broker or powerful corporate attorney he detested.
7
Q
Harlem Renaissance
A
- Harlem Renaissance The intellectual, artistic, and cultural flowering of Harlem 1920s and 1930s.
- The Harlem Renaissance produced a stunning collection ot artistic works, especially in creative writing, that continued into the 1930s.
1919 Claude McKay publishes “If We Must Die”
1920 Eugene O’Neill’s The Emperor Jones
1923 Jean Toomer publishes Cane, The Cotton Club opens, Opportunity: A Journal of Negro Life
1924 Jess/e R. Fauset publishes There Is Confusion
1925 Countee Cullen publishes his book of poetry, Color
l926 Langston Hughes publishes The Weary Blues , George Schuyler’s “The Negro Art Hokum”
1927 Langston Hughes publishes Fine Clothes to the Jew , James Weldon Johnson publishes God’s Trombones: Seven Negro Sermons in Verse
1928 Claude McKay publishes Home to Harlem , Duke Ellington’s band appears at the Cotton Club
1929 Jessie R. Fauset publishes Plum Bun , Wallace Thurman publishes The Blacker the Berry
1930 James Weldon Johnson publishes Black Manhattan
193l Jessie R. Fauset publishes The Chinaberry Tree
l937 Zora Neale Hurston publishes Their Eyes Were Watching God
