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Life Under Jim Crow 1863-1945

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Salah ad-Din View Drop Down
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  Quote Salah ad-Din Quote  Post ReplyReply Direct Link To This Post Topic: Life Under Jim Crow 1863-1945
    Posted: 20-Oct-2012 at 23:53
1863 - The Union raises the first regiments of the USCT (US Colored Troops), recruited predominately from freed slaves; in response the Confederacy threatens to execute any black man caught in a Northern uniform. This year saw the infamous New York Draft Riots, clashes between the Irish and black elements of the city's population that were concluded when soldiers fired on the mob. At least 11 blacks were killed, several hundred were injured, and a black orphanage was burned to the ground.

1864 - The year of the 'Fort Pillow Massacre' in which Confederate general Nathan B. Forrest may have ordered his troops to fire upon surrended Union soldiers, many of them black. Supposedly he was heard to say "kill the niggers" at the start of slaughter, and some of the black soldiers were tortured; a few buried alive.

1865 - The Civil War ends, and in December the 13th Amendment formally goes into effect.

1866 - The Ku Klux Klan, comprised predominately of Confederate veterans, is founded at Pulaski, Tennessee. A series of anti-black riots in Memphis results in about 40 deaths.

1868 - At Camilla, Georgia, white vigilantes attack a crowd of blacks who were marching in a Republican demonstration - 12 are killed and nearly 50 wounded.

1870 - The 15th Amendment guarantees all adult male citizens of the United States the freedom to vote, regardless of their race or "previous condition of servitude". From this point onwards, the KKK and similar groups would use terrorism to force blacks to vote for candidates of the former's choice. In this year Hiram R. Revels becomes the first black Senator in American history, replacing Jefferson Davis in the Mississippi legislature.

1872 - P. B. S. Pinchback, a black Louisianan, becomes governor of his state, and the first black governor in American history.

1873 - Around a hundred blacks are murdered by the White League, a white terrorist organization, in Colfax, Louisiana. Most of those killed were members of a local black militia; some were murdered after surrendering to the terrorists.

1876 - The Supreme rules that the 15th Amendment in fact does not guarantee all citizens the right to vote.

1877 - President Rutherford B. Hayes recalls the last Federal troops from the Southern states, ending the 'Reconstruction Era'. Violence against blacks escalated after this point.

1881 - Tennessee creates a new law that forces all railroad companies in the state to provide separate cars for their black passengers. By the end of the 1880s most or all Southern states had followed this example. This year saw Booker T. Washington found the Normal School for Colored Teachers, in Tuskegee, Alabama.

1895 - Ida B. Wells-Barnet publishes A Red Record, a statistical report on lynching - by now a deeply entrenched phenomenon in the South.

1898 - Louisiana adopts a 'Grandfather Clause' in an attempt to keep blacks from voting - several other states follow in this example in the following years. In this year a race riot in Wilmington, North Carolina, results in the deaths of over a dozen blacks.

1899 - Sam Hose, a black farmer residing in Georgia, was seized by a white mob and burned alive. Pieces of his charred corpse were taken home as souvenirs by his executioners, who justified their actions by claiming he had murdered a white man.

1900 - A shoot-out in the streets of New Orleans concludes with a black man injuring two white policemen. The result is a bloody riot in which several blacks are killed.

1901 - President Theodore Roosevelt has his famous meeting with Booker T. Washingon. Caving under the vicious Southern outcry, Roosevelt never invited Washington back to the White House even though both men had enjoyed their meeting. One Southern newspaper called this incident the 'most damnable outrage that has ever been perpetrated by any citizen of the Unites States'.

1905 - Nashville, Tennessess segregates its streetcars, which are in turn boycotted by the city's black population.

1906 - Race riots in Atlanta, Georgia, leave 25 blacks dead, most murdered in cold blood.

1908 - Springfield, Illinois is home to a bloody confrontation between its black and white populations. Eight blacks are killed, 70 are injured, and more than 2000 flee the area.

1909 - The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People is founded by W.E.B. Du Bois, Mary White Ovington, Henry Moscowitz, Oswald Garrison Villiard, William English Walling, and Ida B. Wells-Barnett. The next year it fights its first legal case, representing a black man who had shot a white policeman in self-defense.

1913 - President Woodrow Wilson segregates federal government departments.

1915 - The Supreme Court declares the 'Grandfather Clause' unconstitutional.

1917 - Black soldiers are allowed to become officers, largely through the efforts of the NAACP. Close to 400,000 black men fight for America during the First World War, and earned the respect and affection of their French comrades. One black regiment, the 369th Infantry, informally fought in the French Army during the War because the American officers present refused to lead it. The 1917-1920 period is known as the 'Great Migration' because of the huge number of black people that moved North, seeking a respite from Jim Crow and the accompanying racist violence.

1919 - This year bore witness to the 'Red Summer'. Race riots broke out in many northern and midwest cities, including Washington DC, Knoxville, Omaha, and most gruesomely Chicago. The Chicago riot was sparked when several little boys - some black and some white - got in a scuffle, and one of the black boys was mistakenly drowned. The city's blacks rose up in revolt, but were quashed by white mobs. The butcher's bill was 23 black dead, 15 white dead, and hundreds of wounded people of both colors. A large part of the city's black population suffered the burning or vandalizing of their homes. This year also saw several race riots in the South, the most bloody at Elaine, Arkansas. The incident at Elaine was sparked when a mob of white racists interrupted a black church service - the result was more than 200 dead blacks. Some had been hunted down and shot like animals.

1921 - Tulsa, Oklahoma is witness to a racially-charged mass shooting. The circumstances are not clear, nor are the number of casualties - estimates for the dead range from as few as 36 to as many as 300. Most of those killed were black.

1922 - The Senate filibusters an anti-lynching law.

1923 - The infamous race riot at Rosewood, Florida, is sparked when a white woman claimed that she had been raped by a black man. Rosewood's population was predominately black, and it came under assault by white gangs from nearby communities. Most of Rosewood was burned to the ground, and an unknown number of its residents were hunted down and murdered.

1925 - No less than 40,000 Klansmen participate in a mass rally through the streets of Washington DC.

1930 - The Nation of Islam is founded by Wallace D. Fard in Detriot, Michigan.

1931 - Nine young black men are falsely accused of raping two white prostitutes in Scottsboro, Alabama, and eight of them are sentenced to death. The result was a lengthy legal battle in which, after seven years, the 'Scottsboro Boys' are finally declared innocent and freed.

1933 - At San Jose, California, blacks Thomas Thurmond and Jack Holmes were accused of murdering a white man. They were imprisoned, but at night the prison was assaulted by a white mob using a battering ram. The prisoners were beaten viciously before being lynched, while policemen stood idly by, watching.

1935 - Rumors that white policement beat a Latino boy spark a riot amongst Harlem's primarily black population, who target white businesses. The result was 3 blacks dead, 200 injured, and 125 in jail. In Florida, black farmer Rubin Stacy was seized by several white men, handcuffed, and lynched. Several white children were brought to the location to witness his death - one is visible, crying, in the photograph depicting Stacy's newly lifeless corpse hanging from a tree.

1936 - The Olympics are held in Nazi Berlin, where Hitler was planning to demonostrate the superiority of the white race. African-American Jesse Owens won no less than four gold medals, humiliating the German dictator.

1939 - Abel Meeropol's song Strange Fruit, about Southern lynching, is made known throughout the country by the jazz singer Billie Holiday.

1942 - No less than 20 black newspapers across the country are threatened with charges of sedition because they criticized the segregation polices of the US Army. James Farmer, leader of a non-violence black civil rights group, stages a sit-in protest at a Chicago coffee shop, in a precursor of Martin Luther King's tactics. Two fouteen year-old boys are lynched at Quitman, Mississippi.

1943 - Race riots in Detriot break out in an amusement park, resulting in the deaths of 25 blacks and 9 whites. Similar events in Harlem result in 6 dead blacks and 185 injured, most of these losses being inflicted by the heavy-handed police force.

1945 - In the year WWII ends, blacks are finally permitted to join the US Army Nurse Corps.

1946 - Maceo Snipes, a black soldier freshly returned from Europe, becomes the first person to vote in Taylor County Georgia since the 1870s. This earned him the status of a local celebrity, and it also earned him a fatal bullet. The local mortician refused to prepare his body for burial, and dumped it in a hole behind his shop. Two young black couples in Monroe, Georgia, are tied up and shot execution-style by a white mob.

Edited by Salah ad-Din - 20-Oct-2012 at 23:59
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Nick1986 View Drop Down
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  Quote Nick1986 Quote  Post ReplyReply Direct Link To This Post Posted: 21-Oct-2012 at 07:18
Hostility to blacks didn't end in 1945. Martin Luther King and Malcolm X both paid the price for demanding civil rights
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  Quote red clay Quote  Post ReplyReply Direct Link To This Post Posted: 21-Oct-2012 at 12:11
Okay, a wonderful piece of cut and paste.  But very little to do with the "Jim Crow" laws, their impact on daily life, and the President whose support for them earned him the title of "Jim Crow President".  On the day he took office, he dismissed all but 2 black employees of the White House, replacing them with "whites".
 
 
And Nick, hostility toward blacks hasn't yet ended.
 
 
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  Quote Salah ad-Din Quote  Post ReplyReply Direct Link To This Post Posted: 21-Oct-2012 at 15:43
I picked the title because it is intended as a sampling of what like was like during the peak of American segregation; it was not intended as an article about the Laws themselves.
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  Quote Michael Collins Quote  Post ReplyReply Direct Link To This Post Posted: 21-Oct-2012 at 18:18
Originally posted by Nick1986

Hostility to blacks didn't end in 1945. Martin Luther King and Malcolm X both paid the price for demanding civil rights


Malcom X turned on Elijah Muhammad (/realised he was a fraud), having experienced inter racial ecumenism in the east denounced everything he formerly stood for. I'm not familiar with the details of his assassination, but I find it possible that it was one of the Black Muslims that killed him. Even if it wasn't, he wasn't too popular amongst the Blacks at the time he was killed.

I've also heard that Martin Luther King's popularity was declining slightly at the time he was killed, though I can't say with any conviction whether this was the case or not. It creates an interesting comparison however, for the two Black martyrs to have been divisive figures in life (and least towards the end) and unifying in death. I would be familiar with some similar figures in Irish history, Charles Stewart Parnell and my namesake to name just two.

I would also like to pay tribute to Salah for his work on this post, those things can be harder to create than many an analytical essay. 
Is í labhairt a dteanga an moladh is mó is féidir linn a thabhairt dár namhaid.
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  Quote Nick1986 Quote  Post ReplyReply Direct Link To This Post Posted: 25-Oct-2012 at 09:58

Rosa Parks, arrested in 1955 for refusing to give up her seat for a white man
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  Quote Centrix Vigilis Quote  Post ReplyReply Direct Link To This Post Posted: 25-Oct-2012 at 16:04
The effect of JC type laws even after their strike down was still felt in varying communites as late as 1975. While the signs and the obvious references to them were removed.....the association and or attitudes of a 'whites only' type establishment/s was still being perped under the exception of 'private clubs', 'private organizations' etc. In fact they still exsist. The most obvious being 'country clubs'.
This attitude, while vigourously denied is often found amongst Faculty organizations in Universities and in colleges.
 
Been there...seen it.
 
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  Quote red clay Quote  Post ReplyReply Direct Link To This Post Posted: 29-Oct-2015 at 10:00
I realize this is an old thread but this is interesting.

Jim Crow relics such as whites only signs are now hot collectibles, some bringing a few thousand bucks.
The most active collectors are African Americans.
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  Quote Centrix Vigilis Quote  Post ReplyReply Direct Link To This Post Posted: 29-Oct-2015 at 16:02
they aint the only ones...member Sambo's restaurant and the like?

PC's led to 'black lifers' and now the only place you can hang such let alone a confederate battle flag..less a museum....is yer basement...kind of a like a porn thing....ya got it but don't show it.

Eradication of civil liberties is not merely touted viz an example of slavery and jimmy crow.

see: http://vintagesigns4sale.com/Store/Black-Americana
"Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence"

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Pilger's law: 'If it's been officially denied, then it's probably true'

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  Quote J.A.W. Quote  Post ReplyReply Direct Link To This Post Posted: 30-Oct-2015 at 01:44
As someone who grew up in an ex-colonial nation (NZ) which had a 'coloured' minority ( albeit 'indigenous') & yet never had an official 'colour bar' - but did have a class/education 'bar', like most places.. I as a kid, found seeing  the late '60s US major-city race riots on the news - was an eye-opener.

& reading one of the few books that told the story, (such as 'The New Centurions' by J.Wambaugh), made me realize how close to the bone the O.P. issue was.. & yet is, being repeated subsequently, from Rodney King to current-ish events in Missouri..

I watched a recent TV documentary about Larry Flynt, who although born as 'poor white trash' made it
good financially in the USA, & this allowed him to show his ability as a free-thinker, so he fought hard - to uphold those brilliantly developed US Constitutional rights.. even as a porn merchant..

& as a human of 'mixed race' ancestry, I feel proud of USA's place among the English speaking 
nations, notwithstanding the backward notions & behaviour of certain cultural groups therein..

Although tough on its poor, ( of any background) by comparison to the other English speaking nations, 
I doubt that many people of its myriad cultures are too keen on returning to their ancestral homelands to live, instead..



Be Modest In Thyself..
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  Quote Centrix Vigilis Quote  Post ReplyReply Direct Link To This Post Posted: 30-Oct-2015 at 14:18
History is a fickle bitch....those who study her long enuff come to realize this.

What was once acceptable in the development of the human condition...will often times be denounced later. Through the decrying of opponents from an emotional sense and not necessarily a practical or historical examination of the context and era.

Only to return (or remain) to (and in) acceptance and laudation... (even if hidden) as that same ongoing development of the human condition occurs. Whether that condition is maturing or stagnating remains subjective in it's acceptance.
"Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence"

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Pilger's law: 'If it's been officially denied, then it's probably true'

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