Jim Crow Era Terms
What is segregation?
A Black activist during the first half of the 20th century who was the first Black person to graduate from Harvard. He founded the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), and believed that Black folks should focus on fighting for full equal rights enshrined in the Constitution.
Who is W.E.B. DuBois?
A group of African Americans that experienced less racism and more freedom in Europe than in the U.S. this motivated them to stand up and fight back against racist incidents when they returned home to the U.S. after the war. "They have returned to old homes but they are not going to submit to old ways."
What is African American WWI soldiers?
What is Plessy V. Ferguson?
A set of laws allowing for racial segregation in transportation, public accomodations, schools, and voting mostly in the U.S. South.
What is Jim Crow laws?
Black political philosopher, that was born a slave, and advocated for Black southerners to focus on vocational training (industrial education) and economic stability over political rights.
Who is Booker T. Washington?
A war in the first half of the 20th century known as the "Great War."
What is WWI?
A tax paid before voting to prevent African Americans from voting.
What is a poll tax?
Individual rights, usually enshrined in the U.S. constitution, such as the right to vote, equality under the law, fair trial, etc.
What is civil rights?
A Black political philosopher from Jamaica, who created the most popular Black organization to date, the Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA), advocated for Black pride, Black Nationalism and Pan-Africanism.
Who is Marcus Garvey?
Tragic event during the summer of 1919, following the end of WWI, which saw violent race riots throughout the country as competition for jobs became a problem, and tensions grew. African American soldiers were participants in these race riots which were typically started by a white mob lynching.
What is the Red Summer?
A test measuring a person's ability to read and write to prevent African Americans from voting in the South.
What is a literacy test?
A tenant farming arrangement that trapped tenant farmers into generational debt and on the same plantation for generations.
What is sharecropping?
A system of education which focus on trade and labor skills or vocational training rather than higher education degrees like literature, poetry, history, philosophy, etc. This was advocated for by Booker T. Washington.
What is industrial education?
Mass movement of African Americans (millions) from the South to the North and West of the United States that began during WWI. WWI created a pull factor of manufacturing jobs in the Northern cities.
What is the Great Migration?
A law allowing for someone to vote if their grandfather voted. The purpose was to help white southerners to vote that were prevented from doing so due to not being able to pay a poll tax or pass a literacy test.
What is the grandfather clause?
A term for interracial marriages. Government passed laws to prevent these kinds of marriages and sexual relations.
What is miscegenation?
A Black woman journalist who was most known for her reports on lynching. She had to leave the South after publishing that the Black men were not "raping white women" but white women were seeking consensual sexual relationship with Black men.
Who is Ida B. Wells?
Art and literature movement of African Americans in northern cities after the beginning of the Great Migration & WWI. Artwork, Jazz music and literature by Jacob Lawrence, James VanDerZee, Zora Neale Hurston, Langston Hughes, Duke Ellington.
What is the Harlem Renaissance?
An extrajudicial murder of a Black person typically for allegedly "raping a white woman," or breaking any of the Jim crow norms such as not lighting a cigarette for a white woman or interacting with a white woman. This was used to terrorize Black southerners into submission of the Jim Crow laws and norms.
Racial Terror Lynchings