In what ways did the African Americans participate in government after the war?

A revolution emerged from a rebellion. The South rebelled, and for three decades after the war most corners of the country experienced a revolution in economic activity, territorial expansion, demography, class structure, education, and politics. No community felt the impact of these changes more than the colored people or Negroes, as they were known then. A young African-American activist, William E. Matthews, writing from Boston in July 1868, captured their sense of pride and promise. "The negro of today looms up and assumes an importance never before accorded him," he asserted, "and he possesses an influence and power which he but little realizes."

Some of that importance, influence, and power, coupled with talent and perseverance, brought political position and, occasionally, leverage for a number of African Americans during the Reconstruction years. Blacks served in Congress and several state legislatures and in federal, state, and local governments at varying levels of authority. Their success and, in many instances, their accomplishments served to encourage the multitude of their race, North and South, for whom freedom still meant little change. The Reconstruction process slowly eroded during the 1870s and died in 1877, when President Rutherford B. Hayes withdrew the last federal troops from the South (from South Carolina and Louisiana).

In "redeeming" their states-that is, assuming control and throwing off the burdens of Reconstruction-southern white leaders had to confront, be confounded by, and control the African American presence. In some areas, such as the black belt (named for the color of its soil, not its people), the numbers were overwhelming. While the question of how to handle a black multitude learning to live in freedom was only one of many economic and political problems that dogged the white South in the final two decades of the century, it clung like a leech to almost every issue.

A major component of that freedom for African Americans was the liberty to move to another plantation or region. Between 1870 and 1900 the South's black population jumped from 4.4 million to 7.9 million. The vast majority of them remained in the South, with substantial numbers moving within that region. Primarily seeking higher income-producing jobs, blacks generally went south and west from the border states, with Alabama, Arkansas, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, South Carolina, and Texas registering large gains. They found employment in farming, building railroads, mining coal and phosphate, making turpentine, and lumbering. Black workers often contracted for short-term jobs, moving on when the contract was up. At the same time, the black population in the North and West practically doubled from about 460,000 to over 910,000, with migration accounting for over 50 percent of the increase. While the migratory pattern varied from decade to decade, the end result was the scattering of African Americans throughout the nation, which continued in greater numbers during the twentieth century.

One major thrust of the migratory pattern was a movement into cities or towns that were becoming urban centers. By 1900, 90 percent of New England's African Americans were city folk, and, in the mid-Atlantic, Midwestern, and western states, from two-thirds to over three-quarters of blacks lived in cities. In the South the percentages were considerably lower, ranging from 19 percent along the Atlantic Coast to about 16 percent in the border states and the Southwest.

Although whites played a role in both abetting and obstructing these migratory movements, the human implications of this diaspora are measured by its impact on African Americans. As Reconstruction petered out state by state in the 1870s, most blacks were weighed down by little political support and less economic opportunity. Job-seeking away from home was an inviting option, but it strained family ties and placed a heavy burden on the women. This "moving on" created an impression of black indolence that whites too readily accepted and to which they added charges of shirked responsibilities and disloyalty. In reality, one historian explained, blacks were merely following an entrepreneurial model, exhibiting "a rational economic response based on their ability to earn a good deal more at occasional jobs paying a daily rate than through an annual agreement."

One movement had a history all its own. From March until May 1879 about six thousand African Americans left Louisiana, Mississippi, and Texas for the plains of Kansas, an exodus characterized as "the most remarkable migration in the United States after the Civil War." Kansas fever had been building in the South for three or four years, encouraged in part by two freedmen, the spiritually sensitive Benjamin "Pap" Singleton and the politically conscious Henry Adams. Emigration to Kansas before 1879 was sufficient to result in the founding of a black town, Nicodemus, and to influence Minnesota Senator William Windom to introduce a resolution asking the U.S. Senate to investigate "the expediency and practicability of encouraging and promoting ... the partial migration" of blacks from the South. Impelled by "terrorism and poverty," the leaderless 1879 migrants had only a firm faith that God would take care of them. Despite white resistance and poor soil, most of them put down their roots in this new land.

Most southern blacks were hopelessly tied to farming. After the war the slave plantation system became a "tenant plantation system" that employed black workers as tenants on a cash, credit, or share basis. The cash system required the tenant to pay rent, while the credit system advanced a loan to him for seeds and other necessities, using the unplanted crop as collateral. Sharecropping split the crop's return into shares for landlord and tenant. All three systems exploited the tenants and kept them debt-ridden and cash poor.

The major crop was cotton. By 1910 substantial percentages of improved land were planted to cotton: almost half of Mississippi's farmland; close to 40 percent of the agricultural acreage in Alabama, Arkansas, Georgia, and Louisiana; and at least one-fifth of the land in Florida, Tennessee, and Texas. While black farm families often shifted laterally and annually from one plantation to another, white pressures assured their lack of cash, credit, and good soil, thereby restricting their upward mobility to land ownership. One historian has observed tartly that the planter's control over the black worker was extensive, reaching beyond the job to "his home, his recreation, and his daily relations with others.... Plantation agriculture may be described as military agriculture." Remembering his parents and grandparents after slavery, one man remarked that they had freedom, but "they knew that what they got wasn't what they wanted, it wasn't freedom, really. Had to do whatever the white man directed 'em to do, couldn't voice their heart's desire."

The sugar plantations of Louisiana and the tobacco farms of Virginia and North Carolina usually hired workers for wages rather than as tenants, but their freedom was circumscribed by seasonal employment and low pay. Where families or husbands and fathers migrated in search of employment, wives, mothers, and grandmothers carried the heavy burden of keeping the family clothed, fed, and together. While the husband/father was the head of the household and often authoritarian, the wife/mother worked in the field, prepared the meals, cleaned the cabin, did the laundry, mended the clothes, bore and cared for the children, and, where possible, worked for cash doing odd chores such as sewing, raising chickens, laundering, or occasional domestic service. Their aspirations for their children embraced release from oppressive conditions and focused on education. South Carolinian William Pickens, Yale Phi Beta Kappa, educator, and official of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), testified out of his own experience that "many an educated Negro owes his enlightenment to the toil and sweat of a mother."

If local obstructions presented baffling barriers for black mothers and families to overcome, national acts and attitudes stood as precipitous mountains. The justices of the U.S. Supreme Court in the 1880s, for example, "shared with other whites a fundamental perception of Negroes as different," vulnerable to "treatment which no classes of whites would have been expected to tolerate." The Court's 1883 decision in The Civil Rights Cases invalidating the Civil Rights Act of 1875 has been called "the most important decision of the decade." The Court, through Justice Joseph P. Bradley, denied that individuals' access to places of public accommodation such as hotels and theaters deserved statutory protection against racial discrimination. With reasoning that was inconsistent with previous landmark cases, such as Prigg v. Pennsylvania (1842) and Munn v. Illinois (1877), the Court held that both civil rights and the public nature of public accommodations were limited and that neither the Thirteenth nor Fourteenth Amendments permitted congressional implementation of the Act. Justice John Marshall Harlan, a Southerner and former slaveholder, was the only dissenter. He maintained that the Fourteenth Amendment conferred "a new constitutional right, secured by the grant of State citizenship to colored citizens of the United States," and that this enabled Congress to enact protective legislation.

While the white South rejoiced at this constitutional justification of its stance, northern states tried to rectify the situation. Massachusetts (1865), New York, and Kansas (1874) already had civil rights statutes on their books; states without civil rights laws moved into the void created by the Court's decision. In 1884, Ohio and New Jersey passed civil rights laws, and seven states followed suit in 1885. By 1895 seventeen states had civil rights legislation on their books, a consequence in most instances of African-American persistence. Unhappily, the statutes were weak, penalties a tap on the wrist, and enforcement often lax.

National politics after Reconstruction showed a rapidly declining interest in African Americans on the part of the Republican party. President James A. Garfield believed that education would close the chasm between the races, but he did not live long enough to test his theory. His successor, Chester A. Arthur, had little interest in black people, Republican or otherwise, and, aside from appointing some blacks to patronage positions to maintain party support, he ignored them. Prominent Republicans, such as former Cabinet member and Senator Carl Schurz; George William Curtis, editor of Harper's Weekly; E. L. Godkin, editor of The Nation; and former abolitionist and Civil War veteran Thomas W. Higginson, came out as Mugwumps, arguing against continuing Republican support of southern black officeholders. The 1884 election victory of Grover Cleveland, a Democrat disinclined to offend the white South, contributed to the diminishing enthusiasm for racial equality.

The black response to this ebbing support by the party of their choice varied by and within sections. Northern blacks, for whom Republican largesse was minuscule, toyed with the idea of leaving the party. T. Thomas Fortune, editor of the New York Age, the most prominent black weekly, and an early Mugwump, continued to snipe at blacks who had remained loyal to the Republicans, although he himself returned to the party after the 1884 election. Black leaders who were frustrated by "the systematic proscription of the colored citizens" in northern states, a white paper reported, contributed to "the murmurs of revolt" that were surfacing. A few blacks, hoping for recognition, supported the Prohibition party in 1886, but to no avail.

In the South, white leaders wrestled with the problem of controlling, or canceling out, the black vote. Fraud and intimidation provided some control, but, although these tactics continued beyond the end of the century, they were uncertain and incomplete. During the 1880s, African Americans voted in measurable, if decreasing, numbers, while the white leadership, primarily the landed upper-class gentlemen of the "courtly" school of southern politicians, searched for ways to eliminate the black voter by law or constitutional mandate. Georgia, South Carolina, Tennessee, and Florida introduced the poll tax, multiple box voting, or the secret ballot in the late 1880s. In the next decade, a flurry of laws further restricted the franchise by requiring literacy and/or property tests and a demonstrated understanding of a clause in the state constitution. By 1908 all eleven former Confederate states had, either by statute or constitutional amendment, removed most blacks and a considerable number of poor or illiterate whites from the electorate.

Black southern politicians loyal to the Republicans saw their influence and patronage gradually disappear by the mid-1880s. P. B. S. Pinchback of Mississippi, for example, a former lieutenant governor and U.S. Senate nominee, lost his job as surveyor of customs in New Orleans in 1885. He later moved to New York and then to Washington, where he remained influential in African-American circles. D. Augustus Straker of South Carolina, who later became a distinguished Detroit attorney and African-American leader, served for two years as a customs inspector in Charleston before moving on in 1882. These and other southern black leaders, beset by internal division, fraud and violence, and a shrinking pool of supportive voters, "played politics with a desperate air." With the cards stacked against them, they knew they were in a losing game.

Out of the confusion and frustration of African Americans looking for a reassuring political home, Fortune issued a call for an Afro-American National League, which finally met in Chicago in January 1890. Proposing to act on economic issues, it flashed like a rocket over African-American skies, dying as quickly several years later, a victim of shoddy organizing and inadequate financing. In addition, a new element provided competition. The popular farmers' movement of the 1870s, the Grange, began in the next decade to foster splinter groups, which sprang up all over the South. These formed cooperatives and lobbied state legislators for a graduated income tax and railroad and telegraph regulation. In some states these groups, known as Wheels or Alliances, made peace with the Knights of Labor, a national labor union based in the North that was spreading its locals through the South.

Facing the issue of black members, the Wheels, Alliances, and Knights initially welcomed them, but, as the Farmers Alliance grew to become the dominant agricultural organization, it yielded to white majority pressure and spurned black members. Similarly, the Knights of Labor succumbed to opposition from within and from outside of its organization and drifted away from integration and, in the 1890s, into obscurity. The American Federation of Labor, founded in 188 1, supplanted the Knights and in 1890 confirmed its commitment to separate unions. A few years earlier, black farmers had formed their own Colored Farmers Alliance, which spread over the South, claiming over a million members and espousing causes similar to those of the white Alliance. From 1889 to 1891, in separate annual conventions held simultaneously with its white counterpart, the Colored Alliance tried to work cooperatively with the white organization, but race-related issues created an unbridgeable gap. The whites' unwillingness to accept black voting and office-holding, added to the threat of Senator Henry Cabot Lodge's Federal Elections Bill of 1890 (which would permit federal investigation of alleged election fraud), split the two Alliances. For African-American laborers and farmers, a few years in the 1880s opened promising vistas of interracial cooperation that quickly closed in the following decade.

When the Alliance movement merged into populism, and populism into the Populist party, blacks found white men such as Tom Watson of Georgia, an outstanding leader, voicing support for their economic interests but not for social equality. The high water mark for the Populists, the presidential election year of 1892, was a trying time for southern blacks, some of whom ended up voting Democratic or Populist. The party's defeat and demise marked the end of black efforts to cooperate on economic and political issues with southern whites. One historian of African-American politics argues that "the bottom was actually reached after 1891." No political measures to assist blacks, such as elections or educational bills, he maintains, can be found between that date and World War I.

The education of blacks was an issue in the late nineteenth century that would not disappear. Reconstruction legislatures dominated by African Americans established school systems that were forward-looking and nondiscriminatory, but these were largely dismantled or seriously underfunded after Reconstruction. In 1882, Senator Henry W. Blair of New Hampshire first introduced an education bill that would have provided millions of dollars to southern black and white schools. Congressional debate was heated, and although the bill passed the Senate three times during the 1880s, it failed passage in the House. On the fourth and final time, in 1890, it lost in the Senate before it reached the House, a victim of the bogey of federal control, sectional animosity, and fear of an educated black population.

The numbers of black students in school had doubled between 1877 and 1887, but still only two-fifths of eligible black children were enrolled. Schools, especially in rural areas, were often dirt-floored log houses without the bare essentials of desks and blackboards. Where cotton, tobacco, sugar, and rice culture prevailed, formal education for black children was hit or miss and brief. "You might find a school close to town somewhere that accommodated the colored," Nate Shaw recalled, "and if you did you were doin [sic] well. But out in the country ... weren't much school [they] could get." When schools existed, they would stay open for a month or two and then close so the children could pick cotton. White schools had much longer terms and better financing. State subsidies for colored schools were small and inadequate; parents often had to make up the difference. Those whose resources would not stretch to include school support kept their children home and at work. Others, especially mothers, for whom their children's education loomed like a bridge to a more responsive world, moved their families to towns and cities where colored schools were better supported and better taught.

For whites, the danger was the extent to which an educated black community would upset the southern caste structure and destroy its labor system. "We must have colored servants," an Alabama minister complained in 1891, "for there is no other laboring class there." A Richmond industrialist and former Confederate general, Thomas Muldrop Logan, agreed, asserting that "when the freedman regards himself qualified to earn a support by mental work he is unwilling to accept manual labor." The result was a flowering of industrial education schools modeled after Hampton Institute in Virginia and, after 1881, Booker T. Washington's Tuskegee Institute in Alabama.

Industrial education meant different things to different people. Tuskegee, the first industrial school managed by blacks, offered a wide range of courses providing agricultural and manual skills. These included, according to the 1883-84 school catalog, "farming, brickmaking, carpentering, printing, black-smithing; and housekeeping and sewing for girls." To these Washington added as future offerings "tinsmithing, shoemaking, painting, and broom-making." His biographer points out that at this early day in the life of Tuskegee Institute, its founder "overstated the industrial offerings" and played down the extensive academic side of the curriculum, which included, among other courses, "Mental and Moral Science, Rhetoric, Grammar and Composition." Nevertheless, training in vocational skills was the major thrust of this and comparable institutions. The irony of industrial education was that it had little to do with the skills required by the rapidly expanding industries: iron, steel, and textiles. It focused instead on the traditional manual trades, and, in that sense, industrial education looked backward rather than forward.

A more unusual and lesser-known side of industrial education was life on the western plains, a form of on-the-job training. The black U.S. 9th and 10th cavalries, known as the buffalo soldiers, policed Indian country from immediately after the Civil War until the Battle of Wounded Knee in December 1890. (The term "buffalo soldiers" is attributed to Native Americans who thought that the black soldiers' hair resembled that of the buffalo.) Tough, battle-scarred veterans, these men erected or refurbished military posts, strung wire, escorted stagecoaches and civilian working parties, opened roads, mapped unknown territories, and located water sources for new settlers. Neither angels nor demons, they were, their biographer concludes, "first-rate regiments." In addition, other African Americans were scattered around the West as lawmen, outlaws, or cowboys, an integral, and occasionally integrated, part of the westward movement.

Richard Wright, the principal of the only colored high school in Georgia, probably did not have buffalo soldiers and black cowboys in mind when he testified before a congressional committee in 1883 "that these differences of race, so-called, are a mere matter of color, and not of brain." Whites in the West were often grateful for law enforcement no matter what the soldiers' color, but white Southerners oppressed the race and suppressed opportunities for its development, while white northerners closed their eyes and their minds to race needs. Yet there was plenty of evidence to support Wright's contention that the color issue obscured the race's intellectual and economic potential.

Southern whites justified violence against African-American men and women, for example, out of a fear of color and a denial of brain. The year before Wright testified, the Chicago Tribune began to publish statistics on lynching, the most dramatic crime. Between 1882 and 1899 over 2,500 black men and women were lynched, almost half of them between 1889 and 1899. Of the victims 2 percent were women. Accusations of rape, attacks on white women, and occasionally murder were the usual excuses for a lynching, along with a host of lesser allegations. Ida B. Wells, a black newspaperwoman in Memphis, castigated the lynching fever in 1892 in a black newspaper, defending black males against a rape charge and exposing the lawlessness of lynching. She was run out of town for her article, and a mob destroyed the newspaper's office. That year marked the highest number of recorded lynchings, but the practice continued through World War I.

Southern violence against African Americans also occurred in ostensibly legal ways. As the law enforcement system trapped more blacks, prisons expanded, the number of black inmates multiplied, and costs escalated. To offset expenses and occupy prisoners' time, states and counties began leasing convicts to railroad builders, planters, and mine owners for a pittance. "Such a system bred ... terrible scenes of inhumanity ... mass sickness, brutal whippings, discarded bodies, near starvation, rape," and made wealthy capitalists of the lessees. As rumors spread about violence and mistreatment, investigations were mounted, reported, and forgotten. The anxieties of white citizens, stirred by newspaper reports of expanding black crime, made this exploitation of prison labor palatable during the last part of the century.

Toward the end of the century, urban violence erupted on a large scale with an anti-black riot in Wilmington, North Carolina. While federal patronage appointments to postmasterships were an initial irritant, the extremist element in North Carolina whipped up white supremacy sentiment based on protecting white women from black men allegedly intent on ravaging them. Following a heated racist election campaign in November 1898, the victorious Democrats could hardly wait to expel Republican officeholders and frighten a black editor into leaving. When communications between negotiating whites and blacks broke down, the lid blew off. Two days after the election, whites turned their guns on blacks and blood flowed.

Powerless to retard the hysteria or retaliate in kind, blacks depended upon friends to speak up and out. Ten days later the Reverend Francis J. Grimke, the eminent African-American pastor of Washington, DC's, Fifteenth Street Presbyterian Church, preached what a constituent called a "vigorous, courageous and manly denunciation" of the riot and other outrages. Shortly thereafter, he published a pamphlet of four sermons on white oppression. On receipt of a copy, George T. Downing, a black former abolitionist and successful caterer, wrote Grimke that his sermons "bristle all over with the needful, with truth, with proper denunciation, with encouragement."

The Wilmington explosion was the first anti-black urban outburst after the Civil War. It was followed by a series of city riots, all nurtured by a mix of black assertiveness and virulent white hostility and fear. New Orleans boiled over in 1900, Atlanta in 1906, and Springfield, Illinois, two years later. It was the Springfield riot that led the journalist William English Walling to suggest a new interracial organization that would become the NAACP.

Violence was a way of life that surrounded the black community after the Civil War and called for defensive mechanisms other than counterattack. Two such devices, growing naturally out of African-American culture, were a maturing social stratification and an expanding adherence to the church. Even before the war, some northern blacks had developed strong class structures in major cities. Philadelphia was perhaps the prototype, followed by New York and Boston. In Philadelphia a number of families that had amassed wealth-not on the scale of white tycoons, but at a comfortable level-set the pattern. Robert Purvis, a former abolitionist and longtime gentleman farmer, used his talents to expand black opportunities. William Still pulled himself up by his bootstraps to become a leading entrepreneur, primarily in the coal and lumber business. Jacob White, Jr., managed a black cemetery, "the biggest single enterprise run by blacks in Philadelphia." In Boston, three generations of the Ruffin family held sway in black society, with a handful of other similarly light-skinned families. The pattern was comparable in New York, Chicago, and smaller cities such as Cleveland and Pittsburgh.

Major southern cities, including Baltimore, Charleston, and New Orleans, each had its slice of African-American aristocracy, men and women who were sufficiently well-to-do to pay attention to class symbols and society. Sometimes with pre-Civil War roots, the families were headed by physicians, attorneys, bankers, civil servants, or politicians. Wives set the social rules, but many participated as activists in such reform movements as women's rights or education. Smaller southern cities such as Atlanta, Memphis, Augusta, and Little Rock copied their larger sisters; the black elite celebrated their status and the family ties that bound them together.

The city at the apex of black wealth and influence was both southern and national. After the Civil War, Washington attracted politicians and civil servants because of the federal government, educators because of black schools and Howard University, ministers because of the plethora of churches, and business people because of the potential African-American market. Aptly called the "Capital of the Colored Aristocracy," Washington had a population of seventy-five thousand African Americans in 1900, of which fewer than one hundred families could be considered part of the social elite. The family of Senator Blanche K. Bruce of Mississippi was an arbiter of social activity, along with James Wormley, proprietor of the well-known hotel that carried his name, and the Cook brothers, both Oberlin College graduates, one the head of the black school system in the district, the other a District of Columbia tax collector. Grimke, longtime minister of the Fifteenth Street Presbyterian Church, and his wife, Charlotte Forten, of the distinguished Philadelphia family, were notable members of black Washington society.

Black society often took the lead in organizing literary clubs that flourished for a time and then faded, but the impulse for intellectual pursuits persisted. The Grimkes and Anna J. Cooper, an educator with a Sorbonne doctorate, met regularly with others at the Grimke home for discussions of previously assigned books, followed by "small talk and general conversation around Mrs. Grimke's tea table." Dances and cotillions, elaborate weddings, and banquets were common among the elite in all cities. Wisconsin's Senator Timothy Howe was one of four white senators to attend an elaborate dinner at former Lieutenant Governor Pinchback's New Orleans home in 1876. Howe's grudging admiration for the guests ("Some were very dark. Others were very light"), the women's appearance ("All were well dressed and some overdressed"), the entertainment of vocal and instrumental music ("Both showed severe culture"), and the dancing ("Some was very good") also characterized his appreciation of the conversation. "I talked for some time with a sister of James Kennedy, not yet eighteen. I have rarely seen a girl of her years so interesting."

Howe's observation about the guests' light and dark skin confirms scholarly doubts that only light-colored blacks comprised the social elite, while their darker brothers and sisters made up the rank and file. Some evidence in these post-Reconstruction decades suggests that the mixed-blood blacks, or mulattoes, often played leadership roles, especially in the North, but a recent study of five southern cities found "little evidence of color as a badge of special status." White Southerners, increasingly appalled by the products of black-white liaisons (for which they or their forebears were largely responsible), gradually tightened state legal strictures against intermarriage, a process that may have slowed down, but could not stop, racial mixing. On the other hand, many northern states, either weary of hostile race legislation or aware of its statutory impotence, repealed their anti-intermarriage laws. Whatever the legal condition, uncounted light-colored blacks continued to pass as white for a first-class train ticket, a hotel room, a job, or, in some cases, for life.

One phenomenon of the African-American class structure before World War I was the absence of a middle class. One could argue that the black elite, for the most part composed of men and women in barbering, teaching, government service, small business, and agriculture or at the lower income end of the professions, was in economic terms a middle class, but those who formed the black elite did not believe that. The underclass, South and North, were the unskilled and semiskilled. In the South they were flattened by lack of cash and credit, lack of upward opportunity, lack of education, and white oppression. In the North, black males held service jobs in restaurants and hotels, drove cartage vehicles and hacks, and were hod carriers, janitors, and miners. Women were cooks, maids, washerwomen, seamstresses, and nursemaids. Factories hired black men for the lowest-paid, lowest-skilled jobs and withheld promotions. Like their southern counterparts, northern blacks lacked access to cash, credit, and upward mobility.

Northern educational opportunities improved as the decades moved toward the new century: schools integrated, black colleges strengthened their offerings, white colleges became more open to blacks, and university graduate schools grew more willing to accept qualified black candidates. The northern underclass, however, faced a double threat from whites; one was an increasing apathy about race matters (what W. E. B. Du Bois called "negative indifference, positive prejudice"), and the second was intense competition from southern European immigrants who flooded the country from the 1880s to just after World War I. Slowly but surely in that period, immigrants took over barbering, waiting, domestic service, and other menial positions in which blacks had once been dominant.

As the northern black underclass was slowly pushed aside by European immigrants, the northern black urban elite felt threatened by black migrants from the South. The fragile stability and substance, as well as the limited advancement and promise that the black elite had achieved in cities such as Detroit, Boston, Philadelphia, and New York, began to dissipate and destruct with the increasing influx of southern blacks who were less educated, farm-oriented, and often darker in color, with different speech, home life, and religious patterns. Black society was "a small group growing by accretions from without," Du Bois affirmed in 1901, "but at the same time ... overwhelmed by [the migrants]." This undermining of the black elite's carefully constructed modus operandi vis-a-vis the white community and within the black community undoubtedly contributed to the urban chaos that accompanied the influx of masses of southern black migrants during and after World War I.

If there was a tie that binds for the African-American community, it was the fiber of religious belief, worship, and institutions. The church, before and immediately following the Civil War, was an incubator for African-American leaders. Men such as Peter Williams, Henry Highland Garnet, J. W. C. Pennington, and Lott Cary stood out in public as well as in the pulpit. "Churches were the largest and most elaborate economic, social, and political institutions organized by African-Americans" before World War II, one historian recently asserted. Their "ritual behavior"-that is, what blacks did in church, at camp meetings, and in prayer groups-was not, as another scholar has demonstrated, "an ecstatic jumble," although countless white contemporaries and some black clergymen thought so. Rather, black liturgy from slavery onward was a rich meld of African tradition, black American experience, and white American practices, varying from region to region, from denomination to denomination, and from church to church.

The African-American church began before American independence, splintering over the decades into about nine major denominations and myriad smaller sects. By the end of the nineteenth century the Negro Baptists had the most members, over two million, followed by the most prominent Methodist Episcopal (ME) denominations (African ME [AME], AME Zion, and Colored ME) with slightly over one million members. The Presbyterians, Episcopalians, Congregationalists, Catholics, and the miscellany of smaller independent denominations attracted many fewer communicants. Most mainstream bodies organized separate divisions for their black churches but retained control over clergy appointments and influenced financial and church building decisions. The black Baptist congregations, however, were autonomous, reporting to no higher administrative authority. This was one major reason for their popularity.

Church liturgy in this period roughly divided according to economic class. The upper-class blacks tended to deprecate emotional outbursts, although their services were considerably more participatory and warmer in feeling than those of their white counterparts. The underclass, as a general rule, was more open and more inclusive: sermons invited responses, hymns were sung with abandon. The ring shout, traceable to African practice, was a popular camp meeting or after-the-service ritual, marked by men and women chanting religious songs as they moved in a circle, slowly increasing the pace, the tempo, and the volume until exhaustion and ecstasy set in.

While the service was central to their belief, African Americans depended on the church for other activities. The minister, poorly paid and sometimes not well educated, was a key figure who often moved his church into secular education (reading and writing), fund-raising for both the church and the black community, sickness and burial benefit societies, and, quietly, occasional political activity. The multiple organizations that emerged in black communities, North and South, were generated by or connected to the church: the Odd Fellows, the Masons, literary clubs, sewing groups, and social gatherings. It was in the church and these related activities that African Americans just out of slavery learned how to organize, handle meetings, resolve internal conflict, persuade the outside public, and protect the rights of their community. For the most part excluded from white associations, African Americans had to be self-taught by experience, and they proved to be able learners. "The church," Du Bois concluded in 1899, "is a centre of social life and intercourse; acts as newspaper and intelligence bureau, is the centre of amusements-indeed, is the world in which the Negro moves and acts." Although Du Bois was writing about Philadelphia, his conclusion could apply to most black churches, North and South.

The decade of the 1890s was a crucial period in determining the future of race relations, in both the North and the South. In the North, states slowly responded to black pressures for civil rights acts. Segregated schools could be found in some northern cities, large and small, although by 1900 most northern states had prohibited separate schools based on race. City neighborhoods that were loosely defined by race after the Civil War were tightening into black enclaves and restricted white areas. In larger cities, by 1900, some enclaves had begun to take on the character of ghettos. In the South, segregation became the common pattern for schools, housing, and businesses. Encouraged by a series of Supreme Court decisions, states gradually segregated transportation facilities.

The key case was Plessy v. Ferguson in 1896 in which a majority found a Louisiana segregation law constitutional. The law required separate accommodations on railroads for blacks and whites, and the Court's opinion, written by Justice Henry B. Brown, a native of Massachusetts, held that this restriction did not infringe upon the liberty of black people enunciated by the Thirteenth Amendment or their rights as citizens guaranteed by the Fourteenth Amendment. Justice Brown denied that the law would lead to an expansion of segregation statutes and practices (he was wrong) and claimed that segregation would be "a badge of inferiority" only if "the colored race chooses to put that construction on it." The lone dissenter, Justice Harlan, demolished the majority argument in a stirring and brilliant opinion that correctly labeled as a "thin disguise" the belief that separate could be equal. In a memorable sentence, he declared that "our Constitution is color-blind and neither knows nor tolerates classes among citizens."

The year before the Plessy decision, Frederick Douglass died. His fame as an abolitionist carried him into Republican politics after the Civil War, and he became a guiding star for many African Americans. Douglass held several federal posts and served as marshal of the District of Columbia (1877-1881), recorder of deeds of the District of Columbia (1881-1886), and minister to Haiti (1889-1891). He used his prominence, along with a skillful pen, superb oratory, and access to government officials, to advance his ideas, often in the face of younger, quite vociferous critics. He stood for trying to work with whites and against the "go-it-alone" approach of some black leaders. He deplored the Kansas exodus of 1879, denounced the Supreme Court's 1883 civil rights decision, accepted the election of Democrat Grover Cleveland, and decried the formation of the Afro-American National League. Although he wanted blacks to speak and act for themselves, he firmly believed in racial cooperation and integration. After his wife's death, he married a white woman who had worked for him in the Recorder's Office. "The most prominent Negro of the day," a biographer noted, "his words carried weight on both sides of the color line."

Several months after Douglass's death, Booker T. Washington, destined to be the best-known black leader prior to World War 1, delivered a speech before a predominantly white audience at the Atlanta Cotton Exposition, urging racial separation in social matters and cooperation in economic spheres. Do not "permit our grievances to overshadow our opportunities," he counseled his race, reminding whites that the black millions could help by "pulling the load upward or they will pull against you the load downward." The speech, later called the Atlanta Compromise, became a rationale for justifying segregation, disfranchisement, and limited educational opportunities. Born into slavery and educated at Hampton Institute in Virginia, Washington was appointed principal of Tuskegee Institute in 1881, before it opened. Slowly but steadily, with the help of black and white supporters, he made Tuskegee a model for black industrial education schools. He frequently traveled north as a fundraiser and public speaker, offering wealthy northerners an opportunity to let their gifts to Tuskegee and other black schools substitute for substance in the fight for equality. Behind the scenes, Washington advised President Theodore Roosevelt on appointments, worked for black enfranchisement, fought discrimination where he could, and subsidized a network of black journals and politicians who fed him information and responded to his instructions about what to write, whom to praise, whom to attack, and what strategy to use in national, state, and local issues.

The year of the Plessy decision, 1896, also saw the awarding of the first Harvard Ph.D. to a black person, W. E. B. Du Bois, whose scholarly talents bore fruit immediately with the publication of his dissertation, The Suppression of the African Slave Trade (Cambridge, 1896); a detailed historical and sociological study, The Philadelphia Negro (Philadelphia, 1899); and a groundbreaking series of race studies published by Atlanta University (1898-1911). After the turn of the century, he opposed Washington's accommodationist philosophy, took a leading role in organizing the NAACP, and became the first editor of its magazine, The Crisis.

While black men occupied an 1890s spotlight, the women of the race were moving on stage. Ida B. Wells's antilynching crusade continued into the next century. Victoria Earle Matthews organized the White Rose Mission and Industrial Association in New York City in 1897 to assist new black arrivals. "Our women," Fannie Barrier Williams, a member of Chicago's black elite, told the World's Congress of Representative Women in 1893, "have the same spirit and mettle that characterize the best of American women." They asked only for the same opportunity to acquire knowledge that was available to other women, after which, she promised, "the exceptional career of our women will yet stamp itself indelibly upon the thought of this country."

Even as Williams was speaking-and she would go on to establish a commendable career encouraging black women to stand up for their rights-others were organizing to defend their character and capabilities. Josephine St. Pierre Ruffin of Boston, Mary Church Terrell of Washington, and Mary Margaret Washington of Tuskegee were working on behalf of women in their local areas when the need for a national organization became clear. In 1896 they and others established the National Association of Colored Women (NACW), combining "the resources and energies of scores of local and regional clubs into one strong organization in order to attack the prevailing negative image of black womanhood." It grew rapidly, defying the image of inferiority attached to black women and aggressively describing their potential, as Terrell defined it in her 1897 presidential address, to "become partners in the great firm of progress and reform." The women of the race were preparing to battle against a pernicious pair: racism and sexism.

Two Ohio literary figures contributed significantly to the decade of the 1890s. Paul Laurence Dunbar's third book of poetry, Lyrics of Lowly Life (New York, 1897), achieved national notice. His dialect poems were superb renditions of a widespread patois, which appealed to whites but confirmed their racial condescension. His short stories, according to one critic, mirrored "the white man's definitions of reality." Not above writing lyrics for minstrel shows and "music-hall entertainments familiarly known as 'coon shows,' " Dunbar also wrote undeniably moving protest poetry. "I know why the caged bird sings, ah me," he intoned, "... when he beats his bars and would be free." Dunbar died of tuberculosis in his thirty-third year, his short life torn by the tension between popularity and protest.

While Dunbar was struggling for and with recognition, Charles W. Chesnutt was publishing short stories in national magazines, taking subtle stands against plantation life and racial discrimination. In 1899, "a banner year," Chesnutt published two books of short stories and a brief biography of Frederick Douglass. His second novel, published in 1901, "prompted" by the Wilmington riot, "was an angry protest" against southern disfranchisement of blacks. In the 1890s the literary accomplishments of a race still caged" began to get national attention.

The late nineteenth century has been described by one eminent historian, Rayford W. Logan, as the "nadir" for blacks in The Negro in American Life and Thought: The Nadir, 1877-1901 (New York, 1954). For a generation this view has held sway, but it is a skewed perspective. Looking at southern and northern whites who perpetrated the physical violence, economic repression, political exclusion, and social ostracism, one could call the period a low point in their existence. Whites created and sustained the conditions and the atmosphere that deprived African Americans of their rights as citizens and human beings. The term "nadir" applies to white communities, North and South, that constructed and enforced a containment barrier around the black community.

For blacks, the late nineteenth century witnessed elements of success in a struggle against great odds. In spite of the oppression, the black community developed a faithful and fruitful life for itself, keeping family ties whole, making do with less than enough money, nurturing male and female leaders, preparing to organize to defend its rights, improving educational opportunities, and fostering literary and artistic achievement. This was no small accomplishment in the face of blanketing, breath-denying opposition; in this sense, the "nadir" term does not fit the black community.

Du Bois emerged in the early twentieth century as a major proponent of the counterattack against white deprivations. His book The Souls of Black Folk: Essays and Sketches (Chicago, 1903) is still a classic. In one essay he praised Booker T. Washington for preaching "thrift, patience, and industrial training," and then criticized him harshly when Washington "apologizes for injustice," concedes disfranchisement, minimizes the effect of "caste distinctions," and "opposes the higher training and ambition of our brighter minds."

Du Bois set the tone for the century to come. "One ever feels his two-ness," he admitted, "an American, a Negro ... two warring ideals in one dark body." His confession was not so much personal as communal; he spoke for his race. And he went on to prophesy with amazing accuracy. "The problem of the twentieth century," he wrote, "is the problem of the color line" all over the world.

The last decades of the nineteenth century set the stage for the next one hundred years: an obdurate white attitude in conflict with a growing black aggressiveness and maturing appreciation of self,

Family, traditions, and the creative instinct. These are contributions of the Gilded Age to posterity.

Source: Leslie H. Fishel, Jr. in The Gilded Age: Essays on the Origins of Modern America (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 1995), 143-60.

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