The Struggle for Black Equality - PowerPoint Presentation

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The Struggle for Black Equality

APUSH - SpiconardiSlide2

“Strange Fruit”

Southern trees bear strange fruit

Blood on the leaves and blood at the root

Black bodies swinging in the southern breeze

Strange fruit hanging from the poplar trees.

Pastoral scene of the gallant south

The bulging eyes and the twisted mouth

Scent of magnolias, sweet and fresh

Then the sudden smell of burning flesh.

Here is fruit for the crows to pluck

For the rain to gather, for the wind to suck

For the sun to rot, for the trees to drop

Here is a strange and bitter crop.Slide3

Lynchings

Lynching

 murdering by a mob

in order to intimidate, control, or otherwise manipulate a population of peopleSlide4

Lynchings

In every year between 1883 and 1905, more than fifty persons were lynched in the South

Estimates vary between 3,500 to 5,00o lynchings in the U.S.

Only one in Canada, but perpetrated by Americans who crossed to border

The lynching of Allen Brooks in downtown Dallas, 1910.Slide5

Source: New York TimesSlide6

Ida B. Wells

Former slave who became a journalist who documented lynchings and a civil rights leader

Writes the pamphlet,

Southern Horrors: Lynch Law in All Its Phases

If it were possible, I would gather the race in my arms and fly away with themSlide7

Southern Horrors: Lynch Law in All Its Phases

But Thomas Moss, Calvin McDowell and Henry Stewart had been lynched in Memphis,…and they had committed no crime against white women. This is what opened my eyes to what lynching really was. An excuse to get rid of Negroes who were acquiring wealth and property…The more I studied the situation, the more I was convinced that the Southerner had never gotten over his resentment that the Negro was no longer his play thing…The federal laws for Negro protection passed during Reconstruction had been made a mockery by the South…

Source: Ida B. Wells, The Crusade for Justice, 1892

The lesson this teaches and which every Afro American should ponder well, is that a Winchester rifle should have a place of honor in every black home, and it should be used for that protection which the law refuses to give. When the white man who is always the aggressor knows he runs as great a risk of biting the dust every time his Afro-American victim does, he will have greater respect for Afro-American life. The more the Afro-American yields and cringes and begs, the more he has to do so, the more he is insulted, outraged and lynched

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Source: Ida B. Wells, Southern Horrors: Lynch Law in All Its Phases (1892

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Jim Crow

Jim Crow

 System of racial segregation in the South named after a minstrel show character that lasted a century, from after the Civil War until the 1960s.

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Jim Crow

Disenfranchisement Laws

Grandfather Clause

Allowed some uneducated whites the ability to vote

Literacy Test

Poll Taxes

Social Etiquette

A black male could not

shake hands

with a white male because it implied being socially equal

White motorists had the right-of-way at all intersectionsUnder no circumstance was a black male to offer to light the cigarette of a white female -- that gesture implied intimacySlide10

Plessy v. Ferguson

(1896)

Landmark Supreme Court case in which the constitutionality of racial segregation was upheld

The Case

In 1890, Louisiana passed a law requiring separate railway cars for blacks and whites

In 1892, Homer Plessy, a man 1/8 black and 7/8 white boards a white only railcar.

He refuses to move to the black railcar

Under Louisiana law, Plessy was legally a black citizenSlide11

Plessy v. Ferguson

(1896)

The Ruling

Read the majority and dissenting opinions

What arguments did each side make?

Court rules 7 to 1 to uphold Louisiana's law providing accommodations were equal

“Separate but equal”

How does this image compare to the reality of the event?