Chapter 14 Flashcards
Explain how the system of sharecropping worked.
Sharecropping had emerged during Reconstruction as as landowners allowed the use of their land for a share of the crop.
The land- lord also usually provided housing, horses or mules, tools, seed, and fertilizer as well as food and clothing.
Sharecropping lent itself to cheating and exploitation. By law, verbal agreements were considered contracts.
When they could, black farmers preferred renting to sharecropping.
In addition to the landowner, many sharecroppers and renters were also indebted to a local merchant for food, clothing, tools, and farm supplies. The merchant advanced the merchandise but took out a lien on the crop.
Many farmers fell deeply into debt to landowners and merchants. They Farmers who were in debt could not leave the land until the debt wa/as paid.
Who was Benjamin “Pap” Singleton and what did he hope to do?
Exodusters moved to Kansas. Several hundred were persuaded to migrate by Benjamin “Pap” Singleton, a charismatic ex-slave and cabinetmaker from Tennessee. Six black men were instrumental in founding the Kansas town of Nicodemus in 1877. Named after an African prince who bought his freedom, Nicodemus thrived tor a few years in the 1880s.
By 1890, however, Nicodemus went into a decline from which it never recovered. Three separate railroads were built across Kansas, but each avoided Nicodemus, spelling economic ruin for the community.
What were Exodusters?
black people headed west. Between 1865 and 1880. 40,000 black people known as Exodusters moved to Kansas.
List and explain the Reconstruction Amendments.
The Reconstruction Amendments are the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth amendments to the United States Constitution, adopted between 1865 and 1870, the five years immediately following the Civil War. The amendments were important in implementing the Reconstruction of the American South after the war.
13: abolished slavery and involuntary servitude, except as punishment for a crime.
14: The amendment addresses citizenship rights and equal protection of the laws, and was proposed in response to issues related to former slaves following the American Civil War. The Due Process Clause prohibits state and local government officials from depriving persons of life, liberty, or property without legislative authorization.
15: prohibits the federal and state governments from denying a citizen the right to vote based on that citizen’s “race, color, or previous condition of servitude.”
Described the system of Jim Crow segregation in the South.
- Segregation on the Railroads
- Streetcar Segregation
- “White” and “colored” signs appeared in railroad stations, theaters, auditoriums, and rest rooms and over drinking fountains.
- Courtrooms maintained separate Bibles for black and white witnesses “to swear to tell the truth.”
- By 1915 Oklahoma mandated white and colored public telephone booths.
- When facilities were made available to black people, they were inferior to those afforded white people. Often, no facilities at hotels, restaurants, libraries, bowling alleys. public parks, amusement hotels, restaurants, libraries, bowling alleys, public parks, amusement parks, swimming pools, golf courses, or tennis courts would admit black People.
- Racial Etiquette : Black and white people did not shake hands. Black people did not look directly into the eyes of white people. Black men removed their hats in the presence of white people. Whi White customers were always served first in a store, even if a black customer had been the first to arrive. etc….
• The term Jim Crow originated with a minstrel show routine called “Jump Jim Crow” that a white performer, Thomas “Daddy” Rice, created ridiculed black people. He How Rice’s character came to be synonymous with segregation and discrimination is not clear.
Identify Ida B. Wells and what she did in her attempt to end lynching. (232-33)
Wells Barnett began life as a slave in 1862and grew up during Reconstruction.
Wells took up journalism. She wrotte a weeekly coluimn for The Living Way. y. In 1 1889 she bought a one-third interest in the Memphis Free Speech & Headlight.
In 1892 her friend Thomas Moss was is lynched d with two other men for the crime of running a successful grocery store. Wells expressed her rage and horror in a fiery editorial, thus beginning a life long crusade against lynching.
Wells Barnett founded the National Association of Colored Women in 1896.
What was lynching and how many took place in the late 1800s?
Between 1889 and 1932, 3,745 people were lynched in the United States
An average of two to three people were lynched every week for thirty years. Depending on the source, statistics on lynching vary. It was difficult t information on lynching, particularly in the nineteenth century. Not every lynching recorded.
There was no such thing as a civilized lynching. Lynchings were barberic, savage, and hideous. Such mob brutality was another manifestation of white supremacy. Black people were murdered, beaten, burned, and mutilated for trivial reasons—or for no reason.
Page 478
What was the Atlanta Compromise?
The Atlanta compromise was an agreement struck in 1895 between Booker T. Washington, president of the Tuskegee Institute, and other African-American leaders, and Southern white leaders.
The agreement was that Southern blacks would work meekly and submit to white political rule, while Southern whites guaranteed that blacks would receive basic education and due process in law.[3][4] Blacks would not agitate for equality, integration, or justice, and Northern whites would fund black educational charities.
The compromise was announced at the Atlanta Exposition Speech. The primary architect of the compromise, on behalf of the African-Americans, was Booker T. Washington, president of the Tuskegee Institute. Supporters of Washington and the Atlanta compromise were termed the “Tuskegee Machine.”
The agreement was never written down. Essential elements of the agreement were that blacks would not ask for the right to vote, they would not retaliate against racist behavior, they would tolerate segregation and discrimination, that they would receive free basic education, education would be limited to vocational or industrial training (for instance as teachers or nurses), liberal arts education would be prohibited (for instance, college education in the classics, humanities, art, or literature).
Explain the Plessy v. Ferguson case and the importance or its outcome.
In 1892 Homer A. Plessy bought a first-class ticket and attempted to ride on the coach designated for white people.
Plessy’s lawyers argued that segregation deprived their client of equal protection of the law guaranteed by the Fourteenth Amendment. . But in 1896 the U.S. Supreme Court in a an 8 to l decision upheld Louisiana’s segregation statute.
Speaking for the majority, Justice Henry Brown ruled that the law, merely because it required separation of the races, did not deny Plessy his rights, nor did it imply he was inferior.
*** After the Plessy decision, southern states and cities passed hundreds of laws that created an American apartheid an elaborate system of racial separation.
Why did poll taxes, literacy tests, and the grandfather clause exist?
AKA: Disfranchisement
With a single black delegate and 134 white delegates, the convention adopted complex voting requirements that without mentioning “race- disfranchised” black voters.
Poll tax: Voting required proof of residency and pay- merit of all taxes, including a two-dollar poll tax.
Literacy tests: In the 1888 election, only 13,740 did. Unhappy that even so few voters might decide an election, U.S. senator Benjamin R. Tillman won approval for a constitutional convention in 1895. The convention followed Mississippi’s lead and created an understanding clause,” but not without a vigorous protest from black leaders.
Grandfather clause: stipulated that only men who had been eligible to vote before 1867–or whose father or grandfather had been eligible before that year would be qualified to vote. Because virtually no black men had been eligible to vote before 1867 most had just emerged from slavery the law immediately disfranchised almost all black voters.
