10. Explain how and why the position of African Americans improved in United States society between 1877 and 1945
Nic Ginn
Question 10
Explain how and why the position of African Americans improved in United States society between 1877 and 1945.
-Between 1877 and 1945, African Americans were at a time where there wasn’t much improvements to their ways of living in the American society.
-At this point in time, the Civil Rights Movement had not fully gotten underway.
-The only major rights that African Americans had at that point was the right to vote and many people didn’t feel they deserved it.
-Even though African American progress had not significantly changed since the 15th Amendment gave the right to vote, the time period known as the Harlem Renaissance was a step in the right direction for African Americans.
Harlem Renaissance
-Blacks organized into different groups in order to support different political movements
-These movements advocated racial equality and had to fight against white racism.
-Leading organizations were the National Urban League and NAACP.
-Famous leaders were WEB Dubois and Langston Hughes
-African American literature and arts began a steady development.
Effects of Harlem Renaissance to African American progress
-Brought black experience into the middle of American culture
-Redefined how America viewed the African American population
-Blacks migrated North, which changed the image of African Americans from rural to more industrial and sophisticated.
-Lead to greater social consciousness
-African Americans gained a sense of self-determination to fight racial inequality, which gave way to the Civil Rights Movement.
-About 20 years after the period of the Harlem Renaissance, Jackie Robinson broke baseball’s color barrier, which gave way to other professional sports being integrated.
-This well-known event gave African Americans the confidence to protest for
equal rights and helped the Civil Rights Movement and leaders obtain the
motivation and willpower to get rid of segregation in the American society.
Lesa K.
Paper 3: Question 10
•The Colored Farmers’ National Alliance
•Ku Klux Klan
oThe KKK was a white fraternal organization that used fear, violence, and intimidation to persecute blacks and to prevent black men from voting
•(1890) Separate Car Law
oPassed in Louisiana and stated that separate cars should be provided for whites and blacks
•(1890) Mississippi Plan
oMississippi’s new state constitution banned blacks from voting and office holding in order to “purify” Mississippi politics
•Grandfather Clause
oMany Southerners and Northerners had made challenges against property and literacy tests, claiming that states were using them as a way of preventing blacks (& poor whites) from voting.
oIn 1898, Louisiana responded to these challenges by legislating the “Grandfather Clause” which stated that voting tests wouldn’t apply to voters whose fathers or grandfathers were registered voters on January 1, 1867, when no black man in the state was registered to vote
•(1896) Plessy vs. Ferguson
•“Jim Crow” Laws
•Booker T. Washington
o(1881) Established an industrial and agricultural school at Tuskegee, Alabama for African Americans
•W.E.B. Du Bois
o(1900) First Annual Pan-African Congress
o(1905) Niagara Movement
o(1910) NAACP
o(1911) First Universal Races Congress
•The Harlem Renaissance (1920 to early 1930s)
oPrimarily a literary movement, but also closely related to developments in African American music, art, theatre, and politics
o1st time publishers and critics took African American literature seriously
