ANC - African American Rights Lesson

African American Rights

African American Rights

18 PLESSY v. FERGUSON (1896). Homer Adolph Plessy, a light-skinned Louisiana black man, was arrested for sitting in a railroad car reserved by Louisiana law for whites. In a New Orleans court his lawyers argued that the law was unconstitutional, but Judge John H. Ferguson ruled against them, on the ground that the railroad had provided separate but equally good cars for blacks, as the law required. This line of reasoning was upheld by the Supreme Court. The case is remembered today mainly for the dissent of Justice John Marshall Harlan. “Our Constitution is color-blind,” Harlan wrote. “The arbitrary separation of citizens, on the basis of race … is a badge of servitude wholly inconsistent with civil freedom.”Race relations in the South worsened. African Americans were denied basic rights. They suffered worse racial discrimination and segregation than what they had encountered in the years after the Civil War. Southern and border states passed segregation laws that required separate public and private facilities for African Americans. These were called Jim Crow laws (after a character in an old minstrel song) and resulted in inferior education, health care, and transportation systems for African Americans. In 1896, the U.S. Supreme Court upheld the constitutionality of Jim Crow laws in Plessy v. Ferguson. Under the "separate but equal" doctrine, the Court ruled racial segregation was legal in public accommodations such as railroad cars.

African Americans disagreed about how to best oppose Jim Crow laws. One group, which sought full social and economic equality for African Americans, eventually formed the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People to seek full civil rights for African Americans. Better known today as the NAACP, this group still keeps its original name in honor of the people who founded it to help overturn Plessy v. Ferguson. W.E.B. Du Bois, an African American intellectual, was a key figure in the founding of the NAACP and the more activist wing of the Civil Rights Movement. Other more moderate voices, such as educator Booker T. Washington, spoke from the black community in proposing a more gradual movement towards equality.

Despite these voices, conditions for African Americans improved little during the Progressive Era. In some ways they became worse as some of the mainstream Progressive leaders avoided the issues facing the black community to avoid controversy, and some were simply racist in their views.

76 “To those of my race who depend on bettering their condition in a foreign land or who underestimate the importance of cultivating friendly relations with the Southern white man, who is their next-door neighbor, I would say, ‘Cast down your bucket where you are.’ ” (Booker T. Washington, speaking at the Atlanta Cotton States and International Exposition, 1895.)77 “… Mr. Washington apologizes for injustice, he belittles the emasculating effects of caste distinctions, and opposes the higher training and ambitions of our brighter minds. … The way for people to gain their reasonable rights is not by voluntarily throwing them away.” (W. E. B. Du Bois, “Of Mr. Booker T. Washington and Others,” 1903.)

First page of the US Chinese Exclusion Act

Asian American Rights

In earlier decades, Asians had immigrated to California and other areas of the American West. Then, in the 1880s, Asian Americans faced anti-immigrant sentiment. When Chinese immigrants accepted low wages for jobs whites had held, employers lowered the pay for all workers. This angered the white workers. They encouraged Congress to pass the Chinese Exclusion Act, which it did in 1882, thereby banning all future Chinese immigration.

Japanese Americans also faced racial prejudice. It was against California law for them to buy land or become U.S. citizens, and the federal government worked with the government of Japan to limit Japanese immigration.

 

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