Transcript Slide 1

Racial Problems for Progressives
• Make-up of the movement.
- Mostly white, middle-class and urban
• Jim Crow Laws
- 1880’s in South, begins legalized segregation
• Sharecropping
- Conditions little different from slavery
• Plessy v. Ferguson
- 1896, Supreme Court decision
- “Separate is equal”
• Birth of a Nation
Washington v. DuBois
Booker T. Washington
• Born in 1856 as a slave in Virginia
• 1881, Founded Tuskegee Normal and Industrial
Institute in Alabama.
• 1901, wrote autobiography, Up from Slavery
• 1901, 1st African-American invited to dinner at
White House.
• Believed social equality would follow economic
equality.
• "In all things purely social we can be as separate
as the fingers, yet one as the hand in all things
essential to mutual progress."
W.E.B. DuBois
• Born in 1868, in Mass.
• First African-American to receive Ph.D.
from Harvard University.
• Believed that the “Talented Tenth” should
pull the rest of the race up to equality.
• 1903, wrote Souls of Black Folk
• 1905, founded Niagara Movement, which
becomes the NAACP.
• Believed that economic equality was
impossible without social equality first.
I, Too, Am American
I, too, sing America
I am the darker brother.
They send me to eat in the kitchen
When company comes,
But I laugh,
And grow strong.
Tomorrow,
I'll be at the table
When company comes,
Nobody'll dare Say to me, "Eat in the
kitchen", Then.
Besides, They'll see how beautiful I am
And be ashamed~
I, too, am America.
By: Langston Hughes
"If
We Must Die"
If we must die, let it not be like hogs
Hunted and penned in an inglorious spot,
While round us bark the mad and hungry dogs,
Making their mock at our accursed lot.
If we must die, O let us nobly die
So that our precious blood may not be shed
In vain; then even the monsters we defy
Shall be constrained to honor us though dead!
O kinsmen! We must meet the common foe!
Though far outnumbered let us show us brave,
And for their thousand blows deal one death blow!
What though before us lies the open grave?
Like men we’ll face the murderous, cowardly pack,
Pressed to the wall, dying, but fighting back!
Source: Claude McKay, “If We Must Die,” in Harlem Shadows: The Poems of Claude McKay
(New York: Harcourt, Brace and Co., 1922).