NCWW - Civil Rights During This Time (Lesson)

Civil Rights During This Time

African American Rights

Race relations in the South worsened in the last decade of the 19th century and the early 20th century.

African Americans were denied basic rights. They suffered worse racial discrimination and segregation than what they had encountered in the Reconstruction Era 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 (NAACP) to seek full civil rights for African Americans. Better known today as the NAACP, this group retains 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.

 

"To those of my race who depend on bettering their condition in a foreign land or who underestimate the importance of cultivating a 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, from his speech at the Atlanta Cotton States and International Exposition, 1895

 

 

"...Mr. Washington apologizes for injustice, he belittles the emasculating effects of caste distinctions, and he opposes the higher trainings 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. Dubois, Of Mr. Booker T. Washington and Others, 1903

 

Despite these voices, conditions for African Americans improved little during the Progressive Era. In some ways, the situation 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.

 

Asian American Rights

In previous decades, Asians had immigrated to California and other areas of the American West. Then, in the 1880s, Asian Americans faced anti-immigrant discrimination. When Chinese immigrants accepted low wages for jobs whites had held, employers lowered the pay for all workers. The reduced pay for all workers angered the white workers who resented the immigrants who were willing to work for rock-bottom wages out of desperation.

Native-born Americans encouraged Congress to pass the Chinese Exclusion Act (pictured, right), which it did in 1882, thereby banning future Chinese immigration for many decades.

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 during the period too.

 

 

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