negative

• Historian Kevern Verney


  white Democrats regain control in the South through electoral fraud and violence, leading to the disenfranchisement of black voters
• Akron, with is booming

  industrial economy, pulled white migrants but repelled African Americans because of its violent history and

  its small black population – 451 in 1890. Dayton had jobs and a black community four x bigger
• Historians Murphy, Cooper and Waldron

  1 African American

  became a Lieutenant (Deputy) Governor of a state, Pinckney Pinchbeck of Louisiana. 20 black men elected to Congress during the Reconstruction era, after the Hayes Compromise last black man left Congress in 1901.
• 4000 freed slaves gained land under the Southern Homestead Act of 1866. plantation was replaced by sharecropping. With very high rates of

  interest for borrowing money, African-American sharecroppers were kept in a cycle of poverty
• The Civil Rights Act of 1875, guaranteeing equal rights in theaters and other public places, was never enforced
• Slaughterhouse Case of 1873, the Court ruled that the rights granted by the Fourteenth Amendment pertained solely to national citizenship
• 1875 US vs Cruikshank case, it was determined that the civil rights outlined in the Fourteenth Amendment did not shield African Americans from discrimination by individuals
• voting restrictions

  • In South Carolina, during the 1880 presidential election, 70% of eligible blacks voted, but by the 1896 election, this number dropped drastically to 11%.
• Mississippi voters had to pass a literacy test, despite under-funded black schools

  1890
• Georgia introduced a poll tax of up to $2, making voting unaffordable for most black citizens

  1877
• Louisiana devised the "grandfather clause", excluding illiterate whites from literacy tests if their grandfathers could vote before January 1, 1867


  1898
• The "grandfather clause" was used in multiple states to disenfranchise illiterate black citizens


  1910
• The US Supreme Court upheld these new voting qualifications in Mississippi vs Williams

  1898
• The impact of these regulations on African American voter registration was significant, with Louisiana seeing a dramatic drop from over 130,000 registered African American voters in 1896 to just 5,300 within four years
• 1899, Cumming vs the Board of Education extended the separate but equal principle to schools, laying the foundation for legalized segregation.
• 1896 Plessy vs Ferguson case upheld segregation, endorsing the “separate but equal” principle.
• In 1883, the Court threw out the 1875 Civil Rights Act, claiming the Fourteenth Amendment applied to governments, not individuals
• • 1887, Florida passed laws enforcing legal segregation, known as the ‘Jim Crow’ laws.
  • Examples of Jim Crow laws include:
  • Alabama: Buses required separate waiting rooms for white and colored races.
  • Florida: Mandated separate education for white and Negro children.
  • Georgia: Prohibited burial of colored persons in grounds used for white persons.
  • Louisiana: Maintained separate buildings for the care of blind persons of the black race.
  • Mississippi: Made intermarriage between white and Negro persons unlawful.
  • North Carolina: Textbooks were not interchangeable between white and colored schools.
• lynchings

  • Howard Zinn noted that between 1889 and 1903, on average, every week, two Negroes were lynched by mobs in the United States. -Between 1882 and 1899, over 2500 black men and women were lynched : white womanhood against Negro sexual assault, investigations revealed that in the period 1889-1918, rape or attempted rape was not even alleged in more than one-sixth of cases.
• Springfield, Ohio, white mobs attacked black-

  owned saloons in 1904 and 1906. The 1908 race riot in Springfield, Illinois, is “the region’s best-known race

  riot before World War I”,
• number of black students in school doubled between 1877 and 1887, but still, only two-fifths of eligible black children were enrolled.