OPPRESSION
Following the defeat of the Southern states in the Civil War, the government passed the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments, freeing all African Americans from slavery and expanding their rights and freedoms.
"Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction."
~ 13th Amendment
1868
"No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States... nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws."
~ 14th Amendment
1870
"The right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude."
~ 15th Amendment
However, Southern States continued to discriminate against African Americans, popularizing Jim Crow Laws to limit social freedom, literacy tests to lessen political freedom, and sharecropping to eliminate economic prosperity.
Segregation Sign, Library of Congress.
"In many southern cities you see the passage of Jim Crow Laws... systematic efforts to disenfranchise African Americans through poll taxes, literary taxes, extra legal forms, intimidation, violence. In many ways, by the turn of the twentieth-century, the legal edifice of Jim Crow had been solidified, and African Americans occupied a position of second-class citizenship."
~ Claudrena Harold, history professor and author
Section of literacy test for African Americans running for government positions, considered a fail should one mistake be made, Ferris.
"All passenger stations in this state operated by any motor transportation company shall have separate waiting rooms or space and separate ticket windows for the white and colored races."
~ Alabama Jim Crow Law
"Every person...operating...any public hall, theatre, opera house, motion picture show or any place of public entertainment or public assemblage which is attended by both white and colored persons, shall separate the white race and the colored race and shall set apart"
~ Virginia Jim Crow Law
African Americans fought against these adversities, establishing colleges to educate themselves. However, white supremacy groups staged violent attacks to target them.
Springfield Massacre of 1908, numerous blacks killed, Zinn Education Project.
Wilmington Massacre of 1898, site today, Zinn Education Project.
Historian detailing events of the Wilmington Massacre, Youtube
“The whisper of "I want to be white" runs silently through their minds…He is never taught to see that [his own] beauty. He is taught rather not to see it, or if he does, to be ashamed of it when it is not according to Caucasian patterns.”
~ Langston Hughes, The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain