Persuasive Essay 2 Pages Double Space
layla97
Session008-BlacksintheUrbanNorth.pptBlacks in the Urban North
From Jim Crow to the Land of Hope
Ghettoization: Racialized Space
Black Leaders: the Harlem Renaissance
Assimilation of African Americans
Black Population in Northern Cities
| 1910 | 1920 | |
| Detroit | 5,000 | 40,800 |
| Cleveland | 8,400 | 34,400 |
| Chicago | 44,000 | 109,400 |
| New York | 91,700 | 152,400 |
The Great Migration
- Similar to immigrants coming to the U.S., African Americans began migrating out of the Deep South to the urban centers in the north.
- Why? What compelled them to leave? What pulled them into the northern cities?
Post-Emancipation Dilemma
- Blacks in the South could not get out of the cycle of economic bondage despite their free status.
- Public lynching, KKK and limited opportunities circumscribed their way of life; many saw this in biblical terms as the Babylonian captivity.
- 1871 – U. Grant signs Civil Rights Act of 1871, a.k.a. Ku Klux Klan Act – federal prosecution against hate group violence during the Reconstruction Era
- Black Codes replaced the slave codes – Plessy v. Ferguson, 1896
Justice John Marshall Harlan
- 1833 b. – 1911 d.
- 1877-1911 Associate Justice, Supreme Court of the U.S.
- Best known for his great dissent in Plessy v. Ferguson (1896), which established the principle of “separate but equal”
Who was Plessy?
- On June 7, 1892, a 30-year-old colored shoemaker named Homer Plessy was jailed for sitting in the "White" car of the East Louisiana Railroad.
- Plessy was only one-eighths black and seven-eighths white, but under Louisiana law, he was considered black and therefore required to sit in the "Colored" car.
- Plessy went to court and argued, in Homer Adolph Plessy v. The State of Louisiana, that the Separate Car Act violated the 13th and 14th Amendments to the Constitution.
?
John Howard Ferguson
- A lawyer from MA who had previously declared the Separate Car Act "unconstitutional on trains that traveled through several states“
- In Plessy’s case he decided that the state could choose to regulate railroad companies that operated only within LA
- On appeal, the Supreme Court upheld the separate but equal doctrine
*
The judge at the trial was John Howard Ferguson, a lawyer from Massachusetts who had previously declared the Separate Car Act "unconstitutional on trains that traveled through several states" [3] . In Plessy's case, however, he decided that the state could choose to regulate railroad companies that operated only within Louisiana. He found Plessy guilty of refusing to leave the white car [4] .
Harlan’s Dissent:
Equal Protection
- "In the eye of the law, there is in this country no superior, dominant, ruling class of citizens. There is no caste here. "Our constitution is colorblind, and neither knows nor tolerates classes among citizens. In respect of civil rights, all citizens are equal before the law. The humblest is the peer of the most powerful. . .”
Harlan on Separation of Races
- “The arbitrary separation of citizens on the basis of race, while they are on a public highway, is a badge of servitude wholly inconsistent with the civil freedom and the equality before the law established by the Constitution. It cannot be justified upon any legal grounds."
Impact on Race Relations?
- "What can more certainly arouse race hate, what more certainly create and perpetuate a feeling of distrust between these races, than state enactments, which, in fact, proceed on the ground that colored citizens are so inferior and degraded that they cannot be allowed to sit in public coaches occupied by white citizens? That, as all will admit, is the real meaning of such legislation. . ."
What opportunities were present in the North?
Pull Forces of Black Migration
Land of Hope in the North
- WWI: Stopped immigration from Europe and drained workers from industries
Niche in factories: blacks were recruited first as strikebreakers and later as permanent workers
Molding, warehouses, yard work, steel foundry, etc.
- Social and psychological freedom of the North: transition from slavery to desegregation. A new generation of blacks emerged.
- By 1930, some 2 million blacks migrated out of the South into the northern cities.
What were the challenges in the North?
Racialized Geography
- The inability of Western cities to cope with the political and everyday encounters with difference has imported (post)colonialism into the cities and produced spatially segregated and racialized geographies. Imperialist and (post)colonial ideologies are embedded in the cities, not only in relation to social and cultural conditions but also in imaginative geographies of urban areas and social/discursive construction of places. (Simonsen, 2008)
Colonial ideologies of space
- Unequal access to privileges, rewards, social capital
- racialization of space and the spatialization of race: plantation, prison, sharecropper’s cabin, ghetto, reservation, tenements
- Spatial control (confinement and containment) coincides with racial control: neighborhood improvement associations, restrictive covenants, redlining, and segregated schools and neighborhoods.
Neighborhood Improvement Associations
- Prevented blacks and other minorities from moving into certain neighborhoods
- They threatened boycotts of real estate agents who sold homes to blacks
What are the Restrictive Covenants?
The Restrictive Covenants
- These documents were contractual agreements among property owners stating that they would not permit a black person to own, occupy, or lease the property.
- In the event of the covenant’s violation, any party to the agreement could call upon the courts for enforcement and could sue the transgressor for damages.
- These restrictive covenants were employed frequently and with considerable effectiveness to maintain the color line until 1948, when the U.S. Supreme Court declared them unenforceable.
Blacks in Industries: opportunities and challenges
- Black labor became critical to auto, steel, meatpacking, mining, longshoring, and other basic industries.
- Black exclusion: 24 national labor unions barred blacks completely.
Race riots in Chicago, Detroit, and New York demonstrated the resiliency of race in industries.
Violence as a Method of Maintaining a Color Barrier
- Between 1900 and 1920 there were numerous incidents of racial violence to prevent blacks from moving into white neighborhoods.
- In the four-year period between 1917 and 1921, some fifty-eight black homes were bombed, which comes out to one bombing in every twenty one days.
- One black real estate agent, Jesse Binga, had his home and office bombed seven times in one year.
Black Ghettoization – racialized space
- Not a natural phenomenon
- History of exclusion and violence
- North practiced a different form of racial accommodation than in the South.
- In the 1950s, the suburbanization contributes to the on-going problem of racial segregation.
Responses to the Ghettoization?
Marcus Garvey
- Starts the United Negro Improvement Association (UNIA)
Black nationalist: attempted to redefine blackness by creating an independent nation in Africa by African Americans and other dispersed Africans.
Garvey emphasized black capitalism and urged them invest in his own shipping company, the Black Star Line Corporation, as well as a chain of restaurants and grocery stores, laundries, a hotel, and a printing press.
Garvey sort of dies in obscurity after serving two years in prison for mail fraud related to his shipping company. He was exiled to Jamaica by Herbert Hoover and never returned to the U.S.
The Harlem Renaissance
- Cultural explosion of African American artists, writers, poets, singers, philosophers, and dancers emerge out of the ghettos.
- People like James Weldon Johnson, Claude McKay, Langston Hughes, Jean Toomer, Countee Cullen, and Zora Neale Hurston greatly impacted American cultural and literary landscape.
What does it mean to be black in America?
Black Leadership Emerges
- Ida B. Wells: outspoken Tennessean who spoke against lynching and for women’s rights (along with Susan B. Anthony)
- Richard Wright: author of Black Boy and Native Son.
- W.E.B. Dubois: founder of NAACP, the Crisis (magazine)
- Phillip Randolph: Organizer of Chicago’s the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters (BSCP)
On Double Consciousness
- After the Egyptian and Indian, the Greek and Roman, the Teuton and Mongolian, the Negro is a sort of seventh son, born with a veil, and gifted with second-sight in this American world, a world which yields him no true self-consciousness, but only lets him see himself through the revelation of the other world. It is a peculiar sensation, this double consciousness, this sense of always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others, of measuring one’s soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity. One ever feels his twoness, an American, a Negro; two warring souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder.
- The history of the American Negro is the history of this strife, this longing to attain self-conscious manhood, to merge his double self into a better and truer self…
- Excerpted from W.E.B. Dubois’ The Souls of Black Folk.
A Dream Deferred
by Langston Hughes
What happens to a dream deferred?
Does it dry up
Like a raisin in the sun?
Or fester like a sore –
And then run?
Does it stink like rotten meat?
Or crust and sugar over –
Like a syrupy sweet?
Maybe it just sags
Like a heavy load
Or does it explode?
What does assimilation mean for African Americans?
