Jump Jim Crow:
Black Culture in Post-Bellum America

 

"The plan: reduce blacks to political impotence. How? By the boldest and most ruthless political operation in American history. By stealth and murder, by economic intimidation and political assassination, by the political use of terror, by the braining of the baby in its mother's arms, the slaying of the husband at his wife's feet, the raping of the wife before her husband's eyes. By fear. Soon the South was honeycombed with secret organizations: the Knights of the White Camellia, the Red Shirts, the White League, Mother's Little Helpers and the Baseball Club of the Baptist Church."

-from Before the Mayflower
by Lerone, Bennet, Jr.

The Ku Klux Klan was formed in room 10 of a Nashville hotel, the Maxwell House, in April, 1867. Led by Confederate Major General Nathan Bedford Forrest, the group consisted of Confederate officers, political leaders, and religious heads from all around the South. President Abraham Lincoln emancipated the slaves in 1863; Congress abolished slavery in 1865; and suffrage was granted to blacks beginning in 1867. But within three decades, sharecropping contracts and Jim Crow laws in the South eroded the rights of blacks, and the Supreme Court's decision in Plessy vs. Ferguson, 1897, institutionalized separate but equal. What the government giveth, the government taketh away, and blacks were forced back on their own resources to move forward.

"I was born a slave on a plantation in Franklin County, Virginia," Booker T. Washington began his autobiography, Up From Slavery. In the same year that Frederick Douglass died--the former slave turned agitator, author, and lecturer, who fought for political equality--Washington delivered his so-named Atlanta Compromise speech that gave comfort to whites, North and South, who found in his words a willingness to forego political equality until blacks had attained basic working and educational skills. Lauded by wealthy whites for his ameliorating stance, Washington became the orienting point for discussion within and around black issues. Inevitably, he was the man W.E.B. DuBois would have to counter a decade later.

Established in 1854, Tuskegee Institutute was Booker T. Washington's reponse to racial inequality. Receiving large financial support from white philanthropists, the college focused on technical and agricultural skills for blacks.
Raised in a small Massachusetts village, DuBois came late to the debate on racial inequality, but he came intellectually prepared. While Washington preached economic pragmatism, DuBois utilized science and intellect to study and address the issue of racial conflict. While Atlanta was the scene of Washington's famed address, it was also the home of Atlanta University, the institution that assisted DuBois in his research. Cautiously supportive of Washington at first, DuBois's research increased his impatience for change, and he came to reject Washington's skills-based stance, advocating instead a movement of intellectual leaders, a "talented tenth," that would demonstrate the equality of blacks with whites. His efforts led to the creation, with others, of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People in 1907 and the first publication of Crisis, a magazine devoted to publishing the best in black thought and art.

DuBois crystallized a movement that had been building. Following the autobiographical slave narratives of the early nineteenth century, black authors slowly infiltrated more mainstream markets, as with Harriet E. Wilson's 1859 publication of Our Nig, a novel detailing the struggles of a free black woman of the North within the framework of a conventional romance. Three decades later, Charles Chesnutt began his career as a short story writer and novelist, later composing The Marrow of Tradition, an accounting of Wilmington, North Carolina's, race riot of 1898. Paul Laurence Dunbar's first volume of poetry was published in 1893, his classically-based compositions counterpointing with the folk and gospel rhythms in the music, prose and poetry of James Weldon Johnson. And in 1883, George Washington Williams's History of the Negro Race in America from 1619 to 1880 was the first major work on black history, presaging DuBois's own publication twenty years later, The Souls of Black Folk.

In Reconstruction's failure to provide for racial equality was born Washington's insistence on self-reliance, typified by his creation of the Tuskegee Institute, a school emphasizing the importance of agricultural and mechanical skills for blacks. And if his work came to be known by many as a compromising of the promises of Reconstruction, many argued it was a compromise necessary in the face of increased lynchings, Jim Crow laws, and sharecropping contracts that returned southern blacks to a de facto slavery. But the freedom many blacks had known from before the Civil War, and the tenuous freedom many experienced after, unleashed the desire for equality on all counts that DuBois came to symbolize. Out of these efforts would be born the Harlem Renaissance, the post-World War I flourishing of arts and intellect, a vital step forward for black culture.